Preparation for the Gospel — Book XI

Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

praef.1| PREFACE: ON THE SUBJECT. The volume before this one, which led the way in the theme of the Preparation for the Gospel now in hand, established, not by my own words but by testimonies from outside, that it is not unlikely that the Greeks, who have contributed nothing wise beyond mere skill and fluency in speech and have contrived everything else from the barbarians, were not ignorant of the oracles of the Hebrews either, and laid hands on these too in part, since they did not keep their hands clean of theft even from the literary labors of their own countrymen. For it was not our argument, as I said, but their own that proved them thieves.

praef.2| Not only that: by setting the dates side by side we learned at the same time that they are very young, in wisdom and in age alike, falling short by a very wide margin of the antiquity of the Hebrews.

praef.3| So much for the previous book. The present one now hastens at last to pay, like a debt, the pledge we promised, and to bring to light the agreement of the philosophers of the Greeks with the oracles of the Hebrews in some, if not all, of their doctrinal theories. Dismissing the superfluous among them, it calls up the chief of them all, judging that Plato alone should serve, in place of all, as the measure for the question, since he alone, having outstripped them all in reputation, seems likely to be sufficient for us in establishing what is sought.

praef.4| And if it should be needed anywhere, for the sake of making the man's meaning clear, I shall also use as witnesses those who have emulated his philosophy, setting out their own words to establish the point at hand.

praef.5| Let it be understood, however, that not everything was said aptly by the man, even if most things were spoken by him with truth. This too we shall show at the proper time, not to disparage him but in our own defense, to explain why we acknowledge having preferred the barbarian philosophy to the Greek.

1.1| Plato divided the whole system of philosophy into three parts, the natural, the ethical and the logical, and then divided the natural again into the contemplation of perceptible things and the understanding of incorporeal ones. You will find this threefold form of teaching among the Hebrews too, since they also had pursued the same kind of philosophy before Plato's time.

1.2| It is worth hearing Plato's views first, and then looking into those of the Hebrews. I shall set down Plato's tenets from those who champion his teaching. Of these, Atticus, a distinguished man among the Platonic philosophers, goes through the man's doctrines in some such way as this, in a work where he takes his stand against those who promise Plato's teachings by way of Aristotle's.

2.1| "Complete philosophy, then, being divided three ways, into what is called the ethical domain, the natural, and further the logical: the first forming each of us into a noble and good person, setting whole households right toward what is best, and indeed ordering an entire people with an excellent constitution and the most exact laws; the second reaching to the knowledge of divine things, of the first principles themselves and of the causes and of everything else that arises from them, which Plato called the inquiry into nature;

2.2| and the third being brought in for the discrimination and discovery of both of these: that Plato was the first, and did the most, to gather into one all the parts of philosophy, which until then had been scattered and strewn about like the limbs of Pentheus, as someone said, and to show philosophy forth as a body and a complete living creature, is plain to everyone as soon as it is said.

2.3| For it is not unknown that Thales, Anaximenes and Anaxagoras and their circles, and all who lived at the same time as they did, occupied themselves only with inquiry into the nature of the things that are; nor does it escape anyone that Pittacus, Periander, Solon, Lycurgus and those like them devoted their philosophy to the life of the state. And Zeno and this whole Eleatic school is likewise known for having applied itself above all to the art of argument.

2.4| Coming after them, Plato, a man perfectly endowed by nature and far surpassing others, as one truly sent down from the gods so that philosophy might be seen whole through him, passed over nothing and worked out each part with precision, neither falling short of what was needed nor carried away into what was useless.

2.5| Since, then, we have said that the Platonist has a share in all of these, speaking about character and conducting dialectic, come, let us examine each in turn."

2.6| So Atticus. The Peripatetic Aristocles bears witness to the same things, in the seventh book of his work On Philosophy, saying word for word as follows:

3.1| "Plato philosophized, if anyone ever did, genuinely and completely. For those who began with Thales continued only in natural inquiry, while Pythagoras and his circle kept everything hidden; Xenophanes and those after him stirred up contentious arguments, which threw the philosophers into great dizziness without supplying any help.

3.2| Socrates not least, as the saying goes, was fire upon fire, as Plato himself put it. For being most gifted and formidable at raising difficulties about anything whatever, he brought in ethical and political inquiries, and also the inquiry concerning the Ideas, being the first to attempt definitions; but stirring up every argument and inquiring about everything, he died before he could finish.

3.3| Others, cutting off certain parts, spent their time on them: some on medicine, some on the mathematical sciences, some on the poets and music. The many, however, admired the powers of words, and some called themselves rhetoricians, others dialecticians.

3.4| Those who succeeded Socrates became men of every sort, with opposed opinions. Some sang the praises of the Cynic life, of freedom from pretension and from passion; others, by contrast, of pleasures. Some boasted that they knew everything, others simply that they knew nothing.

3.5| Again, some rolled about in the middle of things in full view of all, mixing with the crowd, while others on the contrary remained unapproachable and unaddressable.

3.6| Plato, however, perceiving that the knowledge of things divine and human is one, was the first to divide it, and said that one part is the study concerning the nature of the whole, another concerns human affairs, and a third concerns arguments.

3.7| He held that we cannot see human things unless the divine have first been seen; for just as physicians, in treating certain parts, first take care of the whole body, so one who is going to survey things here must first know the nature of the whole. Man is a part of what exists, and the good is twofold, one ours, the other that of the whole, and that of the whole is the more authoritative; for through it ours comes to be.

3.8| Aristoxenus the musician says that this doctrine is Indian. For he says that one of those men met Socrates at Athens and asked him what he was doing in his philosophy; when Socrates said he was inquiring into human life, the Indian laughed at him, saying that no one could see human things who was ignorant of the divine.

3.9| Whether this is true, no one could say with confidence. At any rate, Plato divided philosophy into that concerning the whole, the political, and further the logical."

3.10| Since such was Plato's philosophy, it is time to examine that of the Hebrews, who philosophized in a similar manner long before Plato was born. You will find among them too this same threefold division into ethical, logical and natural studies, if you observe it in the following manner.

4.1| Ethics, then, you will learn was pursued most of all things among them, and with great zeal, in deeds long before words, if you look at the lives of those men. For as the end of goods and the final limit of living blessedly they admired and pursued piety, and friendship with God through the right ordering of character, and not bodily pleasure, as Epicurus held; nor again the threefold division of goods, as Aristotle has it, which honors bodily and external goods equally with the goods of the soul.

4.2| Nor did they pursue the utmost ignorance and want of learning, which some have called by a more solemn name, suspension of judgment; nor again the virtue of the soul. For how great is it among men, and what could it do by itself, without God, toward a life free from pain? Because of this life they fastened everything to their hope in God, like a cable that cannot be broken, and declared that only the man beloved of God is blessed,

4.3| because God, the steward of all good things, who supplies life and is himself the source of virtue and the provider of all things bodily and external, would alone be sufficient for the blessed life to the man who has set out toward friendship with him through wholly true piety.

4.4| Hence the all-wise Moses, the first of all men to hand down in writing the way of life of the God-beloved Hebrews before him, laid out in the manner of historical narrative their civic and practical conduct together. Beginning his teaching from the universal, he established God as the cause of the whole and sketched the origin of the cosmos and the origin of mankind.

4.5| Then, advancing in his account from the universal to the particular, and rousing his students by the memory of the ancient men to emulate their virtue and godliness, he himself also showed himself the author of pious laws laid down by himself; and in every respect he would be clearly one who made provision for the God-loving way of life through care for character. This too our argument anticipated and made plain in the earlier books.

4.6| It would be lengthy to set out here also the prophets who followed after Moses, and their words, which urge to virtue and turn away from all vice. What if I were to bring you the ethical teachings of the very wise Solomon, to which he devoted a book of its own, entitling the work Proverbs, comprising concise maxims, resembling sayings, within a single plan?

4.7| In this way, then, the children of the Hebrews were themselves trained in the ethical mode from ancient times, before the Greeks had even learned their first letters, and shared the same education freely with those who came to them.

5.1| As for the logical mode of Hebrew philosophy, they did not think they ought to pursue it, as the Greeks like to do, by cleverness in sophisms and by reasonings contrived for deceit, but by the grasp of truth itself, which their men wise in the things of God, their souls illumined by divine light, found and by which they were enlightened.

5.2| To sharpen those being educated in their own studies toward this, they handed down to them from earliest childhood the delivery of sacred discourses, narratives of venerable histories, compositions of songs and chants in meter, and moreover problems and riddles, and certain wise and allegorical contemplations, with beauty of fine speech and eloquent utterance in their own tongue.

5.3| They also had certain "second teachers" after the first lessons (for this is the name they like to give to the interpreters of their Scriptures), who brought to light, through interpretation and clarification, what was shadowed in riddles, though not for everyone, yet for those suited to hear them.

5.4| Accordingly, the very wise Solomon among them made the beginning of his book of Proverbs from just this source, all but teaching that this is the reason for the writing, when he said in these very words that every man must know wisdom and instruction, understand words of prudence, receive the turnings of words, understand true justice, and direct judgment, "that I may give," he says, "subtlety to the innocent, and to the young child perception and understanding." For hearing these things the wise man will become wiser, and the man of understanding will acquire steering; he will understand a parable and a dark saying, the sayings of the wise and riddles.

5.5| Such was the promise of the book mentioned. As for the individual propositions of what was said, and their solutions, and the logical treatment, suited to the wisdom and speech of those men, running through all their prophetic Scriptures, whoever likes may take up the books at leisure and learn it from reading them.

5.6| And if anyone should become acquainted with the language itself with a taste for beauty, he would see that among barbarians there are men most skilled in reasoning, who in their own tongue fall nothing short of sophists or rhetoricians.

5.7| They also have poems in meter, such as the great Song of Moses and David's one hundred and eighteenth Psalm, arranged in the meter the Greeks call heroic. At any rate they say these are hexameters, made up of sixteen syllables. And the rest of their verse writings are said to be composed in lines of three or four measures, according to their own language.

5.8| So much for their diction, in which there is a kind of rational intelligence; but their thought cannot be compared with that of men. For the oracles of God and of truth itself were uttered through them, divine pronouncements and predictions, pious lessons, and doctrines of the knowledge of what exists.

5.9| You may take proofs of the logical exactness found in these men from the correctness of their imposition of names, on which Plato too would be seen bearing witness to the Hebrew opinion, and in this very respect agreeing with the philosophy of those men, as it is easy to recognize from the following.

6.1| Moses, long before the name of philosophy came to the Greeks, dealt throughout his whole writing with countless matters concerning the imposition of names; at one time arranging the titles of everything in his work in the most natural manner, at another assigning to God the judgment of the change of name of pious men, and teaching that names are attached to things by nature and not by convention. Plato, following, agrees with the same, and does so precisely by mentioning barbarians and saying that this manner is preserved among them, perhaps hinting at the Hebrews, since one would not easily find such a theory observed among other barbarians.

6.2| He says in the Cratylus: "And a name is not whatever some people agree to call a thing, uttering a piece of their own speech; rather there is a certain correctness of names that is natural, the same for all, Greeks and barbarians alike."

6.3| And going on, he says: "Then will you not hold that the lawgiver, both the one here and the one among the barbarians, so long as he gives the form of the name that suits each thing in whatever syllables, is no worse a lawgiver here than anywhere else?"

6.4| Then next, declaring that the man who understands the right use of names is a dialectician and a lawgiver, he says: "It is the work of a carpenter, then, to make a rudder, with a steersman supervising, if the rudder is to be good. So it appears.

6.5| And the work of the lawgiver, as it seems, is the name, with a dialectician as his supervisor, if a name is to be well given. That is so. It is likely, then, Hermogenes, that the giving of a name is no trivial matter, as you think, nor the work of trivial men, nor of whoever happens along. And Cratylus speaks truly in saying that names belong to things by nature, and that not everyone is a craftsman of names, but only the one who looks to the name that each thing has by nature and can put its form into the letters and syllables."

6.6| Having said so much, after a great many other things he again brings in the barbarians, and then explicitly acknowledges that many names have come to the Greeks from barbarians, saying in these very words:

6.7| "I reflect that the Greeks, especially those living under barbarians, have taken many names from the barbarians. What then? If someone were to look for how these are rightly established in the Greek language, rather than in the one from which the name happens to come, you know that he would be at a loss. Naturally."

6.8| So Plato. Moses, however, anticipates him, being at once a wise lawgiver and a dialectician. Listen to what he says: "And God formed out of the earth all the wild beasts of the field and all the birds of the air, and led them to Adam, to see what name he would give them. And whatever Adam called any living creature, that was its name."

6.9| For by saying "that was its name," what else does he show but that the designations were assigned according to nature? For what has just now been given, he says, was also contained in nature long before, and this name existed and pre-existed in each of the things named, which the man in question, inspired by a greater power, assigned.

6.10| And the very name Adam, being a Hebrew word, would be, in Moses, the title of the earth-born man, because the Hebrews call the earth Adam, and by this the first earth-born man was truly called Adam by Moses.

6.11| The name might also have another sense, when rendered as "red," indicating the nature of the body. But the earthy and earthly and earth-born man, or the bodily and fleshly man, he marked out by the address "Adam."

6.12| The children of the Hebrews also call man by another name, Enos, a name that, they say, signifies the rational element in us, being different in nature from the earthy Adam. And Enos too has its own meaning, being interpreted in the Greek tongue as "forgetful."

6.13| Such is the rational element in us by nature, because of its entanglement with the mortal and irrational. For the part that is wholly pure, bodiless, divine and rational embraces, through the supreme excellence of contemplation, not only the memory of what has come before but also the knowledge of what is to be. But the part that is packed into flesh, pinned together with bones and sinews, burdened with the great, heavy mass of the body, the Hebrew scholar, seeing its deep forgetfulness and ignorance, called with an apt address, naming it Enos, which means "the forgetful."

6.14| Thus it is written in one of the prophets: "What is man, that you remember him? Or the son of man, that you look upon him?" In place of "man," the Hebrew has the name Enos in this first designation of man, as if it said more plainly: "What is this forgetful creature, that you, O God, remember him, though he is forgetful?"

6.15| And "or the son of man, that you look upon him" stands in the writings in question as "or the son of Adam," so that Adam and Enos are the same, the fleshly element being indicated by Adam, the rational by Enos.

6.16| So the Hebrew oracles divide the etymology in this way. Plato, for his part, says that in the Greek tongue the word for man, anthropos, is so called from looking up, anathrein, saying: "Man, at the same time as he has seen, that is, has had sight of something, looks up at and reckons what he has seen, so that he is one who looks up at what he has seen."

6.17| Again, the Hebrews call the man Is. Their word is derived from Es, by which they signify fire, so that the man may be named from the hot and fiery nature of the man.

6.18| And the woman, since it is said that she was taken from the man, shares the designation with the man. For among them the woman is called Essa, as the man is Is. Plato says that aner, "man," is named from the upward flow, ano rhoe; and he adds: "And gyne, 'woman,' seems to me to want to be gone, 'birth.'"

6.19| Again, Moses in the Hebrew tongue rightly calls heaven a "firmament," because it is the first solid and perceptible body of this world after the bodiless and intelligible essence. And Plato says that ouranos, "heaven," is rightly named because it makes us look upward.

6.20| Again, the Hebrews say that the highest, proper name of God is unspeakable and unutterable, and cannot be grasped even by the imagination of the mind; but the name by which we call him God they call Elohim, from El, it seems; and they interpret this as meaning strength and power. So the name of God among them is reckoned from the power and strength about him, by which he is understood as almighty and all-powerful, since he established all things. Plato says that the luminaries in heaven were called theos, "god," and theoi, "gods," from theein, which is to run.

6.21| Such, in outline, are the precise discussions among the Hebrews and in Plato about the correctness of names. Plato says that the names given among men too were set with some thought, and he tries to give the reason, saying, I do not know how, that Hector was so called from having and holding, because he was king of the Trojans; Agamemnon from staying on, agan menein, and holding fast firmly and steadfastly to the decisions made about the Trojans; Orestes from the mountainous, wild and beast-like quality of his character; Atreus from his having a ruinous character; Pelops as one who sees not what is far off but only what is near and close at hand; and Tantalus, he says, signifies the most wretched, talantatos, because of the misfortunes about him.

6.22| These and countless others of the kind you will find said by Plato, who tries to teach that names were given by the first namers according to nature and not by convention.

6.23| But you would not say that the things in Moses are forced, or made by some sophistical ingenuity of invention, when you learn that Cain, among the Hebrews, is rendered "zeal" among the Greeks, and the man in question was thought worthy of this address because he was zealous against his brother Abel.

6.24| And Abel is interpreted "mourning," since he himself became the cause of such a feeling for his parents, who gave these names to their children at their birth, by a certain more divine providence.

6.25| What if I were to bring you Abraham? He was once a student of the heavens, expert in the contemplation of the stars and the lore of the sky, when he laid claim to Chaldean wisdom, and was called Abram, which in the Greek tongue signifies "father on high."

6.26| But God, leading him away from the things here toward the unseen and beyond the things that are seen, used an apt change of name, saying: "Your name shall no longer be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, because I have made you the father of many nations."

6.27| What thought this contains would be a long account. In this matter it suffices to cite Plato as witness to the argument, when he states that some names were set down by a more divine power. He speaks in these very words:

6.28| "For the giving of names should be pursued here with the greatest earnestness; but perhaps some of them were made by a power more divine than that of men."

6.29| This very thing the sacred Scripture of the Hebrews confirms at greater length; and first of all Moses, who taught that Abraham, Isaac his son, and Israel too were named by a more divine power. Isaac is explained as "laughter," carrying with it the symbol of virtuous joy, which God has promised to bestow as a choice reward on those beloved of him.

6.30| His son Israel had earlier carried the name Jacob, but God bestows on him the name Israel in place of Jacob, moving the man of discipline and action to the man of contemplation.

6.31| Jacob is explained as "supplanter," as one who contends in the contest of virtue; but Israel means "seeing God," what the knowing and contemplative mind in man would be.

6.32| Why should I now lay out, through countless other examples, the correctness of the giving of their own names by the all-wise Moses or the sacred oracles of the Hebrews, when the matters at this point need a longer leisure?

6.33| For instance, the Greeks could not give the etymologies of even the first elements of grammar, and Plato himself would not state the reason or reckoning of the vowels or the consonants.

6.34| But the children of the Hebrews could tell the reason for Alpha, which among them is called Alph, which signifies "learning"; and for Beta, which they like to call Beth, and so they name a house; so that the meaning is "learning of a house," or, put more plainly, a kind of instruction and learning in household management.

6.35| And the third letter, Gamma, is called by them Gimel, and so they name "fulfilment." Then, since they call writing tablets Delth, they gave the fourth letter this name, signifying together through the two letters that written learning is the filling of tablets.

6.36| Going through the remaining letters of the alphabet, one would find each of them named by them with some reason and calculation; and they say that the combination of the seven vowels together contains the utterance of a single ineffable name, which the children of the Hebrews, marking it by four letters, assign to God's supreme power, having received from their fathers that this is something unspeakable and secret to the many.

6.37| And one of the wise men among the Greeks, learning this I do not know whence, hinted at it, saying in verse something like this: "The seven vowel letters praise me, the great imperishable God, the untiring father of all. I am the imperishable lyre of all, who have tuned the lyric strains of the heavenly whirl."

6.38| And you would find the meanings of the other Hebrew letters too, if you gave attention to each; but this has already been established by us in the earlier books, when we showed that the Greeks were helped in everything by the barbarians.

6.39| Anyone who investigates the Hebrew language would learn that a great correctness of names is found among those men, since even the common name of the whole nation took its title from Eber. This signifies "the one who crosses over," since in the Hebrew tongue crossing and the one who crosses over is called "Eber."

6.40| The account instructs us to cross over and pass from what is here to the divine, and never to remain and stand at the sight of what is in view, but to move on from these to what is unseen and invisible matters of the theology of the Creator and Maker of the whole. For this reason they called Hebrews those first men who were dedicated to the sovereign of all and cause of the whole alone and held fast to pure and true piety, naming such persons "crossers," those who had passed over in mind.

6.41| And why should I draw this out further, gathering all the evidence of the correctness and exactness of Hebrew names, when the question needs a treatise of its own? Still, speaking in outline, I think that through what has been said I have given proof of the rational teaching among the Hebrews, if, according to Plato, it belonged not to trivial men nor to chance persons but to a wise and dialectical lawgiver to find the names whose nature is proper to things, and such a man has been shown to us in Moses and the Hebrew oracles. What follows after the logical matters, then, but to examine the natural ones, to see how the children of the Hebrews stood in these too?

7.1| The third part of the Hebrew philosophy, which was the natural, divided among them as well into the contemplation of intelligible and bodiless things and the natural science of perceptible things: this the prophets, perfect in every respect, both knew and, when the occasion called, mingled with their own words, not having learned it by conjectures and the pursuit of a mortal mind, nor priding themselves on human teachers, but ascribing their knowledge to the inspiration of a greater power and the breath of the divine Spirit.

7.2| Hence countless predictions were uttered by them about the future, countless matters concerning the constitution of the universe were investigated, again countless things about the nature of animals were distinguished, and a very great deal about plants was set down by each in his own prophecies.

7.3| Moses, who knew the powers of stones very well, made no casual use of the study of them in the garment of the high priest. And again Solomon, if anyone, is attested by the divine Scripture to have excelled in the natural science of these things, where it says:

7.4| "And Solomon spoke three thousand parables, and his songs numbered five thousand; and he spoke about trees, from the cedar in Lebanon to the hyssop that comes out of the wall. And he spoke about beasts and birds and fish. And all the peoples came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and he received gifts from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom."

7.5| Setting out from this, the one who put the all-virtuous wisdom into his own person said: "For he himself gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the working of the elements, the starting point, the end and the middle of times, the shifts of the solstices and the changes of the seasons, the cycles of the year and the positions of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts, the violence of winds and the reasonings of men, the differences of plants and the powers of roots; all that is hidden and unseen I came to know. For wisdom, the craftswoman of all things, taught me."

7.6| Again the same Solomon, investigating the flowing substance of bodies, declares in Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities; everything is vanity. What profit has man in all his toil, at which he toils under the sun?" Then he adds: "What is that which has been? The very thing that will be. And what is that which has been done? The very thing that will be done. And there is nothing wholly new under the sun."

7.7| These and such things he investigated concerning the bodily substance. And going through the other wise men of the Hebrews, you would find them not without a share of similar knowledge. At any rate, as I said before, countless things are said by them about plants, and about animals, land and water creatures, and moreover the nature of winged creatures.

7.8| Indeed, concerning the stars in heaven too, since the Bear and the Pleiades, Orion and Arcturus, whom the Greeks like to call the Bear-warden and Boötes, are mentioned, and no ordinary mention, in the writings of those in question.

7.9| But about the constitution of the world, about the turning and alteration of the whole, about the essence of the soul, the nature of all rational beings, the making of things seen and unseen, and about providence at large; and before these, concerning the first cause of the whole, the theology of the second, and the other things graspable by the mind alone, they have embraced the accounts and contemplations very well and exactly, so that those among the Greeks who afterward searched out the nature of these things would not be wrong to be said to have followed them as younger men follow elders.

7.10| So much for the natural science of the whole. Having divided the account of these matters into two, they thought that the part concerning perceptible things should not be laid out in full before the multitude, nor the common crowd be taught the causes of the nature of things, except so far as it was necessary to know: that the universe does not run of itself, nor does it stand by chance and as it happens from a movement without reason, but is led by the Word of God as charioteer, and governed by the power of an ineffable wisdom.

7.11| Concerning the intelligible things, that they are, what they are, and how they stand as to order, power, and difference, this has been said, set down in the sacred books and handed on to be heard by all, so far as those laying claim to piety needed to know it for the taking up of a devout and temperate life.

7.12| But the deep and hidden account of these matters they left to be sought and taught in secret to those capable of being initiated into such things. It would be well to go through briefly, in outline, also the vision of these, and to show that Plato in this too thought along lines congenial to those in question.

8.1| Furthermore, that the admirable Plato followed after the all-wise Moses and the prophets of the Hebrews in the teaching and contemplation of intelligible and bodiless things is clear from his own words, whether he learned it from a report that reached him (since he is recorded to have spent time among the Egyptians at the time when the Hebrews, having fallen a second time from their own land, were living among the Egyptians while the Persians ruled), or whether he lit upon it himself through the nature of things, or in whatever way was granted the knowledge by God. "For God," he says, "revealed it to them. For his invisible things, understood through what has been made, are clearly seen from the creation of the world, both his eternal power and divinity, so that they are without excuse." You would learn what has been said by examining it somewhat as follows.

9.1| Moses, in his sacred revelations, has given an oracle from the person of God: "I am the One Who Is. Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel: The One Who Is has sent me to you," and he represents God as simply the only one who is, and declares him worthy of this title as properly and fittingly his.

9.2| And again Solomon, speaking of the coming to be and passing away of perceptible and bodily things, declared: "What is that which has been? The very thing that will be. And what is that which has been done? The very thing that will be done. And there is nothing wholly new under the sun, of which one will speak and say, 'Look, this is new.' It has already been in the ages that were before us."

9.3| Following these, we too divide the whole into two, the intelligible and the perceptible, and define the intelligible as bodiless and rational in nature, imperishable and immortal, and the perceptible as existing in flux and decay, in change and turning of its substance; and, gathering all things up into one origin, we hold as doctrine that there is one unbegotten, truly and properly existing, which is the cause of all things bodiless and bodily.

9.4| See how Plato, scraping off not only the thought but even the words and phrases of the Hebrew Scripture, makes the teaching his own, setting it out more broadly in some such words: "What is that which always is, yet has no coming to be? And what is that which is always coming to be but never is? The one is grasped by thought with reason, always the same; the other is opined by unreasoning sensation, coming to be and perishing, but never truly being."

9.5| Has the admirable man not plainly recast the oracle in Moses that says "I am the One Who Is," through the question "What is that which always is, yet has no coming to be?" And he makes this still clearer by saying that what is is nothing other than what is not seen by the eyes of flesh but grasped by the mind. At any rate, having asked what is, he answers himself, saying: "That which is grasped by thought with reason."

9.6| And the saying of Solomon, "What is that which has been? The very thing that will be. And what is that which has been done? The very thing that will be done," he would clearly be interpreting in almost the same words when he says: "That which is opined by unreasoning sensation, coming to be and perishing, but never truly being." And he adds to this:

9.7| "These are all parts of time, the 'was' and the 'will be,' which we carry over, without noticing, to the eternal essence, incorrectly. For we say that it was, is, and will be; but 'is' alone belongs to it in the true account, while 'was' and 'will be' are fittingly said of the coming to be that goes on in time; for they are motions. But what is always the same, unmoving, does not become older or younger through time, nor ever came to be, nor has come to be now, nor will be hereafter at all, nor does it share in any of the things that coming to be has attached to what is carried about in sensation; rather these are forms of time, which imitates eternity and revolves according to number. And besides these there are further things like these: that what has come to be is 'having come to be,' and what is coming to be is 'coming to be,' and again that what will come to be is 'about to come to be.'"

9.8| And lest anyone think that we are misinterpreting the philosopher's words, I shall use commentaries that bring out the sense of these words. Many have turned to the study of them, but it is enough for me now to set beside them the words of a distinguished man, Numenius the Pythagorean, which he sets out somewhat as follows in the second book of the work he wrote On the Good:

10.1| "Come then, let us bring ourselves as close as we can to what is, and say: what is never was, nor will it ever come to be, but always is, in a defined time, the present alone.

10.2| If anyone wishes to call this present 'eternity,' I agree. But we must think that past time has already escaped us, has run away into being no longer; and the future is not yet, but promises that it will be able to come into being.

10.3| It is not reasonable, then, in any way to suppose that what is either is not, or is no longer, or is not yet. For if it is so spoken of, a great impossibility arises in the argument: that one thing is, and is not, at the same moment.

10.4| If this is so, hardly anything else could be, if what is itself is not, in respect of its very being. For what is, is eternal and firm, always in the same state; it has not come to be and then perished, nor grown great and then diminished; nor has it ever become more or less; and, among other things, it will not even be moved in place.

10.5| For it is not right that it be moved, either backward or forward, never up or down; what is will never pass to the right or to the left, nor will it ever move about its own center, but rather it will stand fixed and firm, being always in the same state and in the same way."

10.6| And after other matters, next he adds: "So much, then, as preliminary. As for me, I shall no longer pose or claim ignorance of the name of the bodiless; for it now seems pleasanter to say it than not to say it. And I do say that this is its name, the one long sought.

10.7| But let no one laugh if I say that the name of the bodiless is essence and being. The reason the name 'being' is used is that it has not come to be, will not perish, and admits no other motion nor any change, whether for the better or the worse; that it is simple and unalterable, in the same form, and neither leaves its sameness of its own will nor is forced to do so by another.

10.8| Plato also said in the Cratylus that names are applied to things by likeness to them. Let it then be so, and let it be decided, that what is, is bodiless."

10.9| Then, going on, he adds: "I said that what is, is bodiless, and this is the intelligible. What was said, so far as I remember it, was something like this. But I want to console the one who seeks an account, saying this much beforehand: if this does not agree with the doctrines of Plato, one would have to suppose it to belong to some other great man, of great power, such as Pythagoras.

10.10| At any rate Plato says, let me recall how he puts it: 'What is that which always is, without any coming to be? And what is that which comes to be but never is? The one is grasped by thought with reason; the other is opined by opinion with unreasoning sensation, coming to be and perishing, but never truly being.'

10.11| For he asked what is that which is, declaring it indisputably unbegotten. For he said that what is has no coming to be; for it would be changing, and what changes is not eternal."

10.12| Then, going on, he says: "If, then, what is is in every way altogether eternal and unchangeable and in no way departs from itself, but remains in the same state and stands the same, this would surely be what is grasped by thought with reason.

10.13| But if body flows and is borne along by continual change, it runs away and is not. Hence it is great madness to deny that this is indefinite, opined by opinion alone, and, as Plato says, 'coming to be and perishing, but never truly being.'"

10.14| So Numenius, interpreting more clearly together the words of Plato and, much earlier, those of Moses. It is fitting that the saying should be passed about concerning him, in which he is remembered to have said: "For what is Plato but Moses speaking Attic Greek?"

10.15| See, moreover, whether Plutarch too, expanding the present thought further, does not run together with the philosophers' words set out above and with those, again, which are laid down by the Hebrews in other theologies, in which sometimes God as he speaks oracles is brought in saying, "Because I am the Lord your God, and have not changed,"

10.16| and sometimes the prophet, looking to him, cries out: "All things seen may one day be turned and changed, but you are the same, and your years will not fail." Consider, then, whether, as in a proposition, with the words in Moses, "I am the One Who Is," and "I am the Lord your God; I have not changed," and "You are the same," Plutarch would seem to be interpreting the same thought in his treatise On the E at Delphi, saying word for word:

11.1| "I think, then, that the letter signifies neither a number nor an order nor a conjunction nor any other of the defective parts of speech; rather it is a complete address and salutation of the god, which, together with the word, puts the speaker in mind of the god's power.

11.2| For the god, as it were greeting each of us who come here, addresses us with 'Know yourself,' which is no less than 'Hail.' And we in turn answer the god 'You are,' giving him the address 'You are' as true and unfailing and belonging to him alone."

11.3| "For we have truly no share in being, but all mortal nature, set between decay and coming to be, presents only an appearance and a dim, unsteady seeming of itself.

11.4| If one fixes the mind on it, wishing to take hold, then just as the violent clutching of water, by squeezing and pressing it together, loses what is held as it runs away, so reason, pursuing the excessive activity of any one of the things subject to change and passion, is thwarted, now by its becoming, now by its perishing, unable to lay hold of anything that remains or that truly is.

11.5| For, according to Heraclitus, one cannot step twice into the same river, nor lay hold twice of a mortal substance in its settled state; by the sharpness and speed of change it scatters and again gathers, or rather not 'again' nor 'later' either, but at once it forms and leaves, approaches and departs.

11.6| Hence what comes to be of it never reaches being, because coming to be never ceases or stops, but, always changing, makes from seed an embryo, then an infant, then a child, then in order a youth, then a young man, a man, then an elder, an aged man, destroying the first comings to be and ages by those that follow."

11.7| "But we, absurdly, fear death, though we have already died so many deaths and are still dying. For it is not only, as Heraclitus said, that the death of fire is the birth of air; it is clearer still in ourselves: the man in his prime perishes when an old man comes to be, the youth perished into the man in his prime, the boy into the youth, the infant into the boy; yesterday's man has died into today's, and today's into tomorrow's. No one remains, no one is one, but we become many, tossed about some phantom and common impression of matter, driven round and slipping away.

11.8| Else how, if we remain the same, do we rejoice now in some things, earlier in others, love and hate opposites, admire and blame, use different words and feel different passions, no longer having the same form, the same shape, the same mind?

11.9| For it is not likely that one would feel different things without change, nor, if changing, would he be the same. And if he does not remain the same, he does not exist; rather, from the very fact of changing he becomes another from another. Sensation is deceived, through ignorance of what is, into thinking that what appears is."

11.10| "What, then, truly is? The eternal, the unbegotten, the imperishable, that to which no time brings any change. Time, after all, is something mobile, appearing together with moving matter, always flowing and never holding, like a vessel of decay and becoming. Of this, the 'afterward' and the 'before,' and the 'will be,' and the 'has been,' are by themselves a confession of what is not.

11.11| For to say that what has not yet come to be, or has already ceased to be, is, is foolish and out of place. And that very thing in which, fixing our thought most firmly, we pronounce 'time stands' and 'it is present' and 'now,' reason in turn dissolves and destroys.

11.12| For it is squeezed out into the future and the past, like a ray of light, necessarily split apart for those who wish to see it. And if the measured nature suffers the same as the one measuring, then it too has nothing that remains, nor is it, but is coming to be and perishing in its partnership with time.

11.13| Hence nothing of the sort can be said of what is, such as 'it was' or 'it will be'; for these are certain inclinations, passages and shiftings of what is not by nature made to remain in being."

11.14| "But God is, if one must say so, and is in no time, but in the eternity that is unmoving, timeless and unswerving, before which there is nothing, nor after, nor future, nor past, nor older, nor younger; but, since he is one, he has filled the 'always' with a single 'now'; and what is in accordance with this is alone truly being, not having come to be, nor going to be, nor having begun, nor going to cease.

11.15| So we must revere him and greet and address him in this way, or indeed, by Zeus, as some of the ancients did, with 'You are One.' For the divine is not many things, as each of us is, a motley, festival-like mixture assembled from countless differences arising in our experiences; but what is must be one, as one is what is; and otherness, a difference from being, passes over into the coming to be of what is not."

12.1| Moses and all the prophets among the Hebrews teach that the divine is ineffable, and they hint at the symbol of the ineffable name by their unspoken sign; and Plato agrees with these in the very words, in the Great Letter. Hear what he says:

12.2| "For it is not in any way utterable like other subjects of learning, but after much association with the matter itself and a shared life, suddenly, as light kindled from a leaping fire, it comes to be in the soul and from then on nourishes itself." And this example of light another prophet of the Hebrews had anticipated, saying: "The light of your face, Lord, has been marked upon us." And another again: "In your light we shall see light."

13.1| Moses having said of the God of the whole, "Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one," Plato again, running together with him, teaches that God is one as heaven is one, saying somewhat as follows in the Timaeus:

13.2| "Have we then rightly spoken of one heaven, or would it have been more correct to speak of many, indeed unlimited? One, if it is to be made after the pattern. For that which contains all the intelligible living creatures could never be a second together with another."

13.3| That he knew one God, even though he is accustomed, as is usual among the Greeks, to use the plural designation, is clear also from the letter to Dionysius, in which, giving him tokens for the letters he writes in earnest and those thrown off otherwise, he said that he would head those with nothing serious in them with the name of "the gods," and those composed with careful thought with that of "God." He says, then, word for word:

13.4| "Concerning the token for the letters, both those I write in earnest and those I do not, I think you remember it; still, bear it in mind and pay very close attention. For many are those who bid me write, and it is not easy to refuse them openly. A serious letter, then, 'God' begins, and 'gods' the other."

13.5| The same man explicitly admits that he learned the doctrine about God from ancient times, saying in the Laws: "God, as the ancient account has it, holding the beginning, the end, and the middle of all things that are, completes his course straight on, moving round according to nature. Justice, the avenger of those who fall away from the divine law, ever follows him; and whoever intends to be happy clings to her and follows humbly and in good order. But one lifted up by boasting, or exalted by wealth or honors or even beauty of body, along with youth and folly, burns in soul with insolence, as though he needed neither ruler nor leader, but were able to lead others; he is left deserted by God. Left so, and taking on others like himself, he leaps about throwing everything into confusion, and to many he appears to be somebody; yet after no long time he pays a penalty not unmerited by Justice, and utterly overturns himself, his house, and his city."

13.6| So Plato. But set beside "God, who holds the beginning, the end, and the middle of all the things that are" the words from the Hebrew prophecy, "I am God, the first, and I am after these things"; and beside "completes his course straight on, moving about according to nature," "His face beheld uprightness."

13.7| And for "Justice, the avenger of those who fall away from the divine law, ever follows him," compare "The Lord is just and has loved righteousness"; and "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord"; and "For the Lord is an avenger, and repays those who act exceedingly in pride." And to "whoever is to be happy keeps hold of her and follows humbly" corresponds "You shall walk after the Lord your God."

13.8| And to "one lifted up by boasting is left deserted by God" corresponds "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble," and "The joy of the impious is a monstrous fall." These are but a few of the countless passages about the God over all. Now look at what is said of the second cause, and how.

14.1| Let us, then, take it as agreed in this way what concerns the first cause of the whole. Now consider also what concerns the second, whom the oracles of the Hebrews instruct us to regard as the Word of God, and as God from God, just as we ourselves have been taught to declare in our theology.

14.2| Moses explicitly speaks of two Lords in theology, where he says: "And the Lord made fire and sulfur rain from the Lord upon the city of the impious." Here, as usual for the two, he made a similar placing side by side of the Hebrew characters; and this is their unspoken theology through four letters.

14.3| In harmony with this David, another prophet, who was also king of the Hebrews, declares: "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Take your seat at my right hand,'" indicating the supreme God by the first "Lord," and his second by the second address. For to whom else is it right to suppose the right hand of the unbegotten Godhead is yielded than to him alone of whom the account speaks?

14.4| The same prophet clarifies him more plainly elsewhere as the Word of the Father, representing him of whom he speaks as Maker of the whole, where he says: "By the Lord's word the heavens were made firm."

14.5| And he introduces him as Savior of those who need healing from him, saying: "He sent his word and he healed them."

14.6| And David's son and successor Solomon, showing the same thought by another term, saying wisdom in place of word, goes through the following as from her own person:

14.7| "I, wisdom, have dwelt with counsel, and I have called upon knowledge and understanding." Then he adds next: "The Lord created me a beginning of his ways, with his works in view; before the age he founded me, in the beginning, before the making of the earth, before the mountains were settled; before all the hills he begets me. When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him."

14.8| And of the same again are these words: "God in wisdom founded the earth, and prepared the heavens in understanding." And these too are said to be from the same: "All that is hidden and manifest I came to know; for wisdom, the craftswoman of all things, taught me."

14.9| Then he adds: "What wisdom is, and how she came to be, I will declare, and I will not hide mysteries from you; rather I will follow her track from the beginning of her coming to be."

14.10| And next he makes plain such things as these: "She is a spirit intelligent, holy, only-begotten, manifold, subtle, nimble, clear, undefiled, all-powerful, all-seeing, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure and most subtle. For wisdom moves more swiftly than any motion, and she pervades and penetrates all things because of her purity. For she is a vapor of God's power and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled falls into her. For she is a radiance of eternal light and an unspotted mirror of God's working and an image of his goodness. She reaches mightily from one end to the other and orders all things well." So the Scripture. The sense of the doctrine Philo the Hebrew, interpreting it more clearly, sets out in the following manner:

15.1| "For it is fitting for those who have made themselves companions to knowledge to aim at seeing what is; but if they cannot, at least at seeing its image, the most holy Word."

15.2| In the same work he also says: "And even if one is not yet worthy to be called a son of God, let him strive to be adorned according to his firstborn Word, the eldest of angels, who is archangel with many names.

15.3| For he is called Beginning, and Name of God, and Word, and the man after the image, and he who sees, Israel. Therefore I was led a little earlier to praise the virtues of those who say that all of us are sons of one man.

15.4| For although we have not yet become worthy to be thought children of God, yet we are children of his invisible image, the most holy Word; for the eldest Word is the image of God."

15.5| And again he adds: "I heard, moreover, one of Moses' companions utter an oracle like this: 'Behold, a man whose name is Rising.' A most strange designation, if you suppose that the one made up of body and soul is meant; but if the bodiless one who bears the divine form, you will readily agree that the name Rising was given him most aptly.

15.6| For the Father of the whole caused this eldest son to rise, whom elsewhere he named firstborn. And the one begotten, imitating the ways of the Father, and looking to his archetypal patterns, formed the kinds."

15.7| Let this much from Philo the Hebrew be set down here for me, taken from the work entitled That the Worse Is Wont to Attack the Better. In the books of the Preparation for the Gospel, on another occasion, when I set out the doctrines of the piety of the ancient Hebrews, the matters concerning the second cause were also adequately treated, and to these I shall now refer the lovers of learning. Now that so many theological statements have been made among the Hebrews in this manner about the second cause of the whole, it is time to listen to Plato too, who says the following in the Epinomis:

16.1| "And let us render honors, not giving a year to one and a month to another, nor assigning some portion or some time to some, in which each runs through its own orbit, helping to bring to completion the order that the most divine Word of all ordained. This the happy man first admired, and then conceived a longing to learn all that is possible to mortal nature."

16.2| And in the letter to Hermias, Erastus and Coriscus he has set down the doctrine very guardedly, writing word for word: "All three of you must read this letter, best of all together, or if not, in pairs, in common, as often as possible, and use it as a compact and binding law, which is just, swearing by it with an earnestness not unmusical, and with the education that is the sister of earnestness, and swearing by the God who is leader of all that is and that is to be, and by the Lord, the Father of the leader and cause; whom, if we philosophize rightly, we shall all clearly know, so far as the power of blessed men allows."

16.3| Does it seem to you that Plato, in saying this, followed the teachings of the Hebrews? Or from where else did it occur to him to name, above the cause of all created things, another God, who is also father of the sovereign ruler? And from where did he get the title "Lord" to set upon the Father of the Maker, when no Greek before him had heard these things, nor had they even been put into their minds?

16.4| And if we again need other witnesses for an indisputable demonstration of the philosopher's thought and of the structure of his argument, hear how Plotinus makes it clear to you, in the work he composed on the three primary subsistences, writing:

17.1| "If anyone admires this perceptible world, looking at its size, its beauty, and the order of its eternal motion, and at the gods in it, some visible and some unseen, and at the daemons, and all living things and plants, let him rise to its archetype and what is more truly real, and there let him see all things intelligible, and eternal in their own understanding and life, and over them the unsullied Mind as ruler, and an incomprehensible wisdom."

17.2| Then next he adds, saying: "Who, then, has begotten this? The simple one, the one before such a thing, the cause of its being and of its being many, the one who makes number. For number is not first; before the dyad stands the one, and the dyad is second, and came to be from the one."

17.3| And again, going on, he adds: "How then, and what must we think about that which abides? A radiance from it, yet from it while it abides, as the bright light about the sun runs around it, always being generated from it, while it abides.

17.4| And all things that are, so long as they abide, give from their own essence, out of the power present in them, a necessary subsistence around them toward what is outside them, dependent on them, being a sort of image of the archetypes from which they sprang.

17.5| Fire has the heat that is about it, and snow does not keep its cold only within. Things that are fragrant above all bear witness to this: for as long as they are, something goes out from them around them, and whatever is near enjoys it as it comes to be.

17.6| And all things, once they are perfect, beget; what is always perfect begets always and eternally; and it begets something less than itself.

17.7| What then must be said about the most perfect? That nothing comes from him, except the greatest things after him. And the greatest after him is Mind, and second. For Mind sees him and needs only him, while he has no need of Mind. And what is begotten from what is better than Mind is Mind; and Mind is better than all things, because the others come after it."

17.8| Next after this he adds, saying: "Everything that has begotten longs for and loves what it has begotten, and most of all when the begetter and the begotten are alone. And when the begetter is also the best, it is necessarily with him, so that they are separated only by otherness. We say that Mind is the image of that one. For one must speak more plainly."

17.9| And again after this he adds: "And for this reason Plato's triads: all things, he says, are about the king of all, the first things; and the second about the second things, and the third about the third. He also says that he is father of the cause, calling Mind the cause; for Mind is for him the Maker.

17.10| He says that this Mind makes the soul in that mixing bowl. And since Mind is the cause, he calls the Good father, the one beyond Mind and beyond essence. In many places he calls being and Mind the Idea. So Plato knew that Mind comes from the Good, and soul from Mind; and these doctrines are not new, nor of today, but were stated long ago, though not openly; the present discussions have become interpreters of those, having confirmed by testimonies that these opinions are ancient, from the writings of Plato himself."

17.11| So Plotinus. Numenius, who champions Plato, himself in his books On the Good interprets the following about the second cause:

18.1| "One who is going to understand the first and second God must first distinguish each point in order and in some good arrangement; and then, when it seems well in hand, then one must attempt to speak in an orderly way, and not otherwise; for he who lays hands on it too early, before the first things have come to be, is said to find the treasure turned to ashes.

18.2| Let us not suffer the same; but calling upon God, who becomes the standard of himself in the account, to reveal a treasure of thoughts, let us begin in this way. We ought now to pray, but we must also distinguish.

18.3| The first God is simple, being in himself, because he consorts with himself throughout and is never divisible. The God who is second and third, however, is one; and coming together with matter, which is a dyad, he unifies it, but is himself split by it, since it has a desiring character and is in flux.

18.4| Since, then, he is not directed toward the intelligible (for he would then be directed toward himself), because he looks to matter, and attends to it, he becomes heedless of himself.

18.5| And he touches the perceptible and tends it, and also lifts it up to his own character, having reached out toward matter."

18.6| And after other matters he says: "For the first must not create; and the first God must be thought of as the father of the God who creates.

18.7| If, then, our inquiry were about the creative one, saying that the one who existed earlier must be pre-eminently fitted to make, this approach to the argument would have been proper; but if the argument is not about the Maker, and we are inquiring about the first, I excuse myself from what has been said and let those things stay unspoken, and I go on to capture the account, hunting it from another side.

18.8| But before the account of its capture, let us make with ourselves an agreement, not open to dispute, to hear that the first God is idle from all works, and a king, while the creative God governs, going through heaven.

18.9| Through him too is our voyage, as Mind is sent down in a passage for all who are appointed to share in it.

18.10| When God looks and turns toward each of us, then bodies live and are nourished, God caring for them through his outflung rays; but when God turns back to his own vantage-point, these are extinguished, while the mind lives, enjoying a blessed life."

18.11| So Numenius. Now set beside them what was sung long ago among the Hebrews in the prophecy of David, in this manner: "How great are your works, Lord; you have made all things in wisdom. The earth is filled with your creation. All look to you to give them their food in due season. When you give to them, they gather; when you open your hand, all will be filled with goodness. When you turn away your face, they will be troubled. You take away their spirit, and they fail and return to their dust. You send forth your spirit, and they are created, and you renew the face of the earth."

18.12| How would this differ from the philosopher's thought, which says that "when God looks and turns toward each of us, then bodies live and are nourished, God caring for them through his outflung rays; but when God turns back to his own vantage-point, these are extinguished"?

18.13| Again, when the saving word among us says, "I am the vine; the cultivator is my Father; you are the branches," hear the kind of theology Numenius gives concerning the second cause:

18.14| "And again, as the farmer stands in relation to the one who plants, in exactly the same relation stands the first God to the Maker. He who is sows the seed of every soul into all the things that share in him; the lawgiver plants, distributes, and transplants into each of us what was laid down beforehand from there."

18.15| And next, again, concerning how the second came to subsist from the first cause, he says the following: "Whatever things, given, pass to the receiver, having gone away from the giver, are service, goods, hollow coin with its stamp. These are mortal and human. Divine things, however, are of such a kind that, when imparted from here to there, they have not left here, and, having come there, they benefit the one without harming the other, and add to his recollection of what he knew.

18.16| This fine possession is fine knowledge, from which the receiver benefits, while the giver does not lose it. It is as you might see a lamp kindled from another lamp and having light, which did not take it from the first, but the matter within it was kindled by the other's fire.

18.17| Such is the possession of knowledge: given and received, it remains with the giver, and the same knowledge is with the receiver.

18.18| The reason for this, stranger, is nothing human; rather the state and essence that has the knowledge is the same in God who gave and in me and you who received.

18.19| Therefore Plato too said that wisdom came to men through Prometheus, with a most brilliant fire." And again, going on, he says next:

18.20| "These are the lives, one of the first God, the other of the second. Obviously the first God will be standing, while the second is the reverse, in motion. The first is concerned with the intelligibles, the second with the intelligibles and the perceptibles.

18.21| Do not be amazed that I said this; for you will hear something far more amazing. In place of the motion that belongs to the second, I say that the standing that belongs to the first is a motion innate to him, from which pour out upon the whole the order of the world, its everlasting abiding, and its preservation."

18.22| In addition to these he adds in the sixth book: "Since Plato knew that among men only the Maker is recognized, while the first Mind, who is called Being itself, is wholly unknown among them, therefore he spoke as one might say:

18.23| 'O men, the Mind you suppose to be first is not first, but another Mind, before this one, older and more divine.'"

18.24| And after other matters he adds: "A helmsman, carried in mid-sea, sits high above the rudders and steers the ship with the tillers, while his eyes and mind are stretched straight upward toward the heights of the upper air, and his way goes on high through heaven while he sails below on the sea. So the Maker too, having bound matter with harmony so that it neither falls apart nor wanders away, himself is seated above it, as above a ship on the sea, the matter; he guides the harmony, steering with the Ideas, and instead of heaven he looks to the God above, who draws his eyes to himself, and receives the power of judging from contemplation and the power of impulse from longing."

18.25| And the saving word among us says: "Of himself the Son can do nothing, unless he sees the Father doing it." But so much from Numenius on this. That his words are not his own, but explained what Plato held, there is no need to add anything.

18.26| That Plato was not the first to use these conceptions, but that the wise men of the Hebrews had anticipated him, has been shown by what has been set out. Fittingly, then, Amelius, a distinguished one of the later philosophers, himself an adherent, if anyone was, of Plato's philosophy, though he called the Hebrew theologian a barbarian and did not deign to name the evangelist John, nonetheless bears witness to his words, writing these very things word for word:

19.1| "And this, then, was the Word by whom the things that come to be came to be, as being always, as Heraclitus too would have required; and, by Zeus, the one whom the barbarian holds to stand, in the order and dignity of the beginning, with God and to be God; through whom all things without exception came to be; in whom what came to be was by nature living, and life, and being; who falls into bodies and, clothed in flesh, appears as a man, while even then showing the greatness of his nature; and who, being loosed again, is deified once more and is God, such as he was before being brought down into the body and the flesh and the man."

19.2| This is no longer veiled, but is plainly now, with uncovered head, a paraphrase from the barbarian theology. And who was the barbarian for him, if not John, the evangelist of our Savior, a Hebrew of the Hebrews?

19.3| At the beginning of his own writing he speaks theologically somewhat in this way: "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God. In the beginning this one was in God's presence. Through him everything came to be, and apart from him not a single thing came to be that has come to be. Life was in him, and that life was men's light. And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us, and we gazed upon his glory, glory as of an only-begotten from a father."

19.4| Concerning the same, hear what another theologian of the Hebrews relates: "He is the image of the unseen God, the firstborn of all creation, because in him all things in the heavens and on the earth were created, whether visible or invisible; and all things hold together through him, and all things were created in him, both the visible and the invisible."

19.5| So even what concerns the establishment and substantiation of the second cause is thus in agreement between the wise men of the Greeks and the Hebrew writings. Let us move on, then, to other subjects.

20.1| The oracles of the Hebrews, after the account of the Father and the Son, list the Holy Spirit in third rank, and so place the holy and blessed Triad in this manner, as a third power surpassing all created nature, being first among the intelligible essences brought into being through the Son, and third counting from the first cause. See how Plato too hinted at something of the kind in his letter to Dionysius, saying:

20.2| "I must tell you in riddles, so that if the tablet should come to harm in the folds of sea or land, the reader may not understand. It is like this: all things are about the king of all, and all things are for his sake, and he is the cause of all fine things; the second is about the second things, and the third about the third. The human soul, then, strives to learn what these are like, looking to what is akin to itself."

20.3| Those who try to explain Plato's meaning trace these words up to the first God, then to the second cause, and as third the soul of the world, defining it too as a third god; but the divine Scriptures, as has been set out, rank the holy and blessed Triad of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as a first principle. Next after this comes the examination of the essence of the Good.

21.1| The divine Scripture of the Hebrews teaches in various ways that the essence of the good, and the good itself, is nothing other than God, both where it says, "The Lord is good to all who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him," and "Give thanks to the Lord, because he is good, because his mercy endures forever," and in what the saving word declared to the man who questioned him about this, saying: "Why do you ask me about the good? No one is good except one, God."

21.2| Listen to Plato, what he says in the Timaeus: "Let us say, then, for what reason the one who put together put together coming to be and this universe. He was good; and in the good no jealousy ever arises about anything. Being free of this, he wished all things to be as like himself as possible."

21.3| And in the Republic he says this: "Is it not so that the sun is not itself sight, but, being the cause of sight, is seen by sight itself? So it is, he said. This, then, I said, is what you must understand me to mean by the offspring of the good, which the good begot in proportion to itself: as the good stands in the intelligible region to mind and to the things known by mind, so this stands in the visible region to sight and to the things seen."

21.4| And next he adds: "This, then, which provides truth to the things known and gives the power of knowing to the one who knows, you must say is the Idea of the good." And then, once more, he says:

21.5| "You will say, I think, that the sun provides to the things seen not only the power of being seen but also their coming to be, growth and nourishment, although it is not itself coming-to-be. How could it be? So too, for the things known, say that not only their being known is present to them from the good, but also their being and their essence are added to them from it, though the good is not essence, but surpasses essence, exceeding it in rank and power."

21.6| By these words Plato states most plainly that the intelligible essences have from the good, that is, from God, not only their being known but also their being and their possession of essence; and that the good "is not essence, but surpasses essence, exceeding it in rank and power." The result is that he does not set them down as of the same essence, nor even regard them as unbegotten, since they have received both their being and their essence from the one who is not essence but surpasses essence, exceeding it in rank and power. This is the One whom alone, and with good reason, the oracles of the Hebrews declare to be God, since he is the cause of all things.

21.7| Things, then, that have neither being nor essence from themselves, and moreover do not belong to the nature of the good, it is not reasonable to count as gods, since the good is not present in them by nature. For this must be assigned to One alone and to no other, to the only Good, which surpasses all essence too in rank and power"; so Plato wonderfully declared. And again Numenius, in his books On the Good, interpreting Plato's thought, goes through it in this way:

22.1| "Bodies we are able to grasp, since they are indicated to us from similar things and from the identifying marks that lie in what is near them. But there is no means of grasping the good from anything adjacent, nor again from any similar object of sense. Rather, it will be necessary, as if someone sitting on a lookout post, with keen sight, spotted at a single glance one small fishing boat, one of those light skiffs, alone, a single one, deserted, tossed among the waves, so a man must go far away from the objects of sense and keep company with the good alone, alone with it. There no human being is present, nor any other living thing, nor any body great or small, but only a certain unspeakable and indescribable, truly divine solitude, where are the haunts and dwellings and splendors of the good, while the good itself is in peace, in kindness, serene, sovereign, gracious, riding upon essence.

22.2| But if someone clings to the objects of sense and imagines the good as flitting over them, and then, in his luxuriating, supposes he has met the good, he is wholly mistaken. For in truth the approach to it requires not an easy method but a divine one. And the best course is to neglect the objects of sense, to take courage for the mathematical studies, to behold the numbers, and so to practice in earnest the study of what that which is is."

22.3| This he says in the first book; but in the fifth he says: "If essence and the Idea are intelligible, and mind has been agreed to be older than this and its cause, then this very mind alone is found to be the good. For if the Maker is god of coming-to-be, it suffices that the good be the principle of essence. In proportion to this, the Maker-god, who is its imitator, is related to the good as coming-to-be is to essence; for coming-to-be is an image and likeness of it.

22.4| And if the Maker of coming-to-be is good, surely the Maker of essence will be the good-itself, innate in the essence. For the second god, who is twofold, makes both his own Idea and the world, being Maker; and thereafter he is wholly contemplative.

22.5| And since we have reasoned out names for four things, let these be the four: the first god, the good-itself; its imitator, the Maker, who is good; the essence, one of the first and another of the second, whose likeness is the beautiful world, adorned with participation in the beautiful."

22.6| And in the sixth book he adds: "Those things that participate in it do so in nothing else but in thinking alone; in this way, then, they would benefit from union with the good, and otherwise not. And indeed thinking has fallen to the first alone. Seeing that the other things take their color from it and are made good by it, if this belongs to that one alone, it would be the mark of a rather foolish soul still to dispute it.

22.7| For if the second is good not from himself but from the first, how can the one through whose participation he is good fail to be good, especially if it is as good that the second has come to share in him?

22.8| In this way, then, Plato, by reasoning, gave to the keen-sighted the good, showing that it is one." And again he says next:

22.9| "Plato set down these things as they are, dividing them one way and another. For separately he wrote [….] of the Maker in the Timaeus, saying 'he was good'; while in the Republic he named the good the Idea of the good, as though the good were the Idea of the Maker, since he has appeared to us as good through sharing in the first and only one.

22.10| For just as men are said to be so because they have been stamped by the Idea of man, oxen by the Idea of ox, and horses by the Idea of horse, so also, reasonably, the Maker, if he is good through sharing in the first good, would have as his Idea the first mind, which is the good-itself."

23.1| "The world, which has come to be in this way, has been made, clearly, in relation to what is grasped by reason and thought, and in the same condition. And since this is so, it is entirely necessary that this world be an image of something. For the intelligible living things the former contains within itself, as this world contains us."

23.2| This is from Plato in the Timaeus. But I shall set out the meaning of what has been said from the works of Didymus, composed On the Tenets of Plato. He writes as follows:

23.3| "Plato says that the Ideas are definite patterns, according to genus, of the things that are by nature perceptible, and that from them come knowledge and definitions. For beyond all individual men one conceives a certain Man, and beyond all horses a Horse, and generally, beyond the living creatures, a Living Creature, unbegotten and imperishable.

23.4| And as many impressions come from one seal, and many likenesses of one man, so from every single Idea come the very many natures of perceptible bodies: from the Idea of men, all men, and by the same reasoning for the other things that exist by nature.

23.5| The Idea is an eternal essence, the cause and principle of each thing's being such as the Idea itself is.

23.6| Just as, then, the particular patterns precede perceptible bodies like archetypes, so there exists the most beautiful and most perfect essence, embracing all within itself, as the pattern of this world; for it was in likeness to this that the god who made it brought it to completion, in his providence, out of all essence."

23.7| This also comes from the man mentioned. Yet Moses, the all-wise, anticipates these things, teaching that before the sun and stars that are visible, and before the seen heaven, which he calls the firmament, and before the dry land we know, and before our day and night, God, the ruler of the universe and cause of all things, made a light other than the sun's light, and day and night and the rest.

23.8| Indeed, the children of the Hebrews after Moses also define a certain bodiless sun, not visible to all nor accessible to mortal eyes, as the prophet says, speaking in the person of God: "But for those who fear me the sun of righteousness shall rise."

23.9| And righteousness itself, not the kind found in men but its Idea, another prophet of the Hebrews knew, who said of God: "Who has awakened righteousness from the east? He called it to his presence, and it will go forth like one before the nations."

23.10| And a divine Word, bodiless and subsisting in essence, our common argument has just now established for us from the Hebrew scripture in the preceding pages. Of this Word these things also are said among the same writers: "who became for us wisdom from God, as well as righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

23.11| He is called also life, and also wisdom, and also truth. And all things that exist and subsist in essence the words of the Hebrews teach (if indeed the apostles and disciples of our Savior are Hebrews), and indeed countless other bodiless powers, beyond heaven and beyond all material and flowing essence; the images of these, they say, were impressed upon the objects of sense; and for these they have already taken over even the name of "image."

23.12| The human being, at any rate, they have expressly said to be an image of an intelligible pattern, and that the whole life of human beings passes through its course in an image. Moses says: "And God made the human being; according to the image of God he made him." And again another Hebrew, philosophizing in the manner of his fathers, says: "Surely man walks about in an image." Now hear also how the interpreters of the sacred laws make clear the meaning of the writings of Moses. The Hebrew Philo, interpreting the ancestral teachings, says in these very words:

24.1| "If someone wanted to use plainer names, he would say that the intelligible world is nothing other than the Word of God already engaged in making a world. For the intelligible city, too, is nothing other than the reasoning of the architect, who is already planning to found the intelligible city.

24.2| This doctrine belongs to Moses, not to me. At any rate, when he records the origin of the human being, he afterwards expressly acknowledges that he was formed after the image of God.

24.3| But if the part is an image of an image, clearly the whole form too, this entire world of sense, if it is greater than the human image, is clearly a likeness of the divine image; and the archetypal seal, which we say is the intelligible world, would itself be the pattern, the archetypal Idea of the Ideas, the Word of God."

24.4| "He says that in the beginning God made the heaven and the earth, taking 'beginning' not, as some suppose, in the sense of time (for there was no time before the world), but as something that came into being either with it or after it.

24.5| Now, since time is the interval of the world's motion, and motion could not come to be before the thing moved, but must of necessity be established either after it or together with it, then time too must necessarily have come into being either of the same age as the world or younger than it; and to dare to declare it older is unphilosophical.

24.6| But if 'beginning' is not here taken in the sense of time, it is likely that it is meant in the sense of number, so that 'in the beginning he made' is equal to 'first he made the heaven.'"

24.7| Then he says next: "First, then, the Maker made a bodiless heaven and an invisible earth, and the Idea of air and of void; of these he named the one darkness, since air is black by nature, and the other the abyss, for the void is very deep and gaping.

24.8| Then the bodiless essence of water and of spirit, and over all a seventh thing, light, which again was bodiless, an intelligible pattern of the sun and of all the light-bearing stars that were to be established in the heaven.

24.9| The spirit and the light were deemed worthy of precedence: the one he named 'of God,' because spirit is most life-giving, and God is the cause of life; and the light because it is exceedingly beautiful; for the intelligible surpasses the visible in brilliance and radiance as much as the sun, I suppose, surpasses darkness and day surpasses night, and as much as the mind, the ruler of the whole soul, surpasses the eyes of the body, its judges.

24.10| That invisible and intelligible light came into being as an image of the divine Word who interpreted its genesis; and it is a star above heaven, the source of the stars of sense, which one might not unfittingly call the All-Radiance, from which the sun, the moon, the other planets, and the fixed stars draw the fitting rays, each according to its capacity, while that unmixed and pure radiance is dimmed from the point where it begins to turn in the change from the intelligible to the perceptible. For nothing that belongs to sense is unalloyed."

24.11| And after a little he adds: "Now since light came to be, and darkness withdrew, and boundaries were fixed in the intervals between, evening and morning, there was necessarily completed at once the measure of time, which he rightly called day; and he called it, not the first day, but one day, a term used on account of the singleness of the intelligible world, since it has a unitary nature.

24.12| The bodiless world, then, already had its completion, established in the divine Word; and the world of sense was brought to perfection after the pattern of this. And first of its parts, and best of all, the Maker made the heaven, which he truly called the firmament, since it is corporeal. For body is by nature solid, being that which is extended in three dimensions. And what other notion is there of the solid and of body than that which is extended in every direction? Reasonably, then, setting the sensible and body-like world against the intelligible and bodiless one, he called it solid." So Philo. And Clement agrees with him in the sixth Miscellany, saying as follows:

25.1| Barbarian philosophy also knows of a world that is intelligible and one that is sensible: the one archetypal, the other an image of the beautiful pattern. It assigns the one to the monad, as being intelligible, and the sensible to the hexad; for among the Pythagoreans the hexad is called a marriage, as being a number that bears offspring.

25.2| And in the monad it establishes an invisible heaven, a holy earth, and light that is intelligible. "For in the beginning," it says, "God made heaven and earth; and the earth was invisible." Next it adds: "And God said, Let light come to be, and light came to be." But in the sensible creation of the world it makes a solid heaven (and the solid is perceptible), and a visible earth and light that is seen.

25.3| Does it not seem to you that from this Plato leaves the Ideas of living beings in the intelligible world and makes the perceptible forms according to the intelligible kinds?

25.4| Reasonably, then, Moses says that the body was molded from earth, which Plato calls the earthly tent, and that the rational soul was breathed in from above by God into the face.

25.5| For there, they say, the ruling part is established, explaining the entrance of the soul, by way of the senses, into the first-formed man; for this reason man was made in the image and according to the likeness. For the image of God is the Word, divine and royal, the impassible man; and the image of the image is the human mind." Let us listen also to what is to be said next.

26.1| Moreover, Plato, following the words of the Hebrews, says that there are not only bodiless and good powers but also opposing ones, writing in roughly these terms in the tenth book of the Laws:

26.2| "A soul that governs and dwells in all things that move in every way: must we not say that it governs heaven too? Of course. One soul, or several? Several; I will answer for the two of you. Let us at any rate posit no fewer than two, the one that does good and the one that is able to work the opposite."

26.3| Then, a little further on, he says: "For since we have agreed among ourselves that heaven is full of many good things, but also of their opposites, and of the latter more, there is, we say, an undying battle of this kind, which needs wonderful guarding. And our allies are gods and spirits, while we in turn are possessions of gods and spirits."

26.4| Where Plato got this too I could not say; but what I can say truthfully is that countless ages before Plato was born this doctrine too was acknowledged among the Hebrews.

26.5| For their scripture says: "And it was like this day, and the angels of God came to present themselves before God; and the devil came among them, having gone around the earth and walked about on it," calling the opposing power "devil," and naming the good powers "angels of God."

26.6| The same scripture also calls these good powers divine spirits and ministers of God, where it says: "He who makes his angels into spirits, and his ministers into a flame of fire."

26.7| And the one who said, "Our struggle is not with blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of the darkness of this age, and against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places," also sets out the conflict of opposites in these terms.

26.8| Plato appears outright to be paraphrasing the saying of Moses, which says: "When the Most High apportioned the nations, as he dispersed the sons of Adam, he fixed the boundaries of the nations in keeping with the number of God's angels," by which Plato defined the whole race of human beings as possessions of gods and spirits.

27.1| And on the immortality of the soul Plato does not differ from Moses in opinion. For Moses first defined the soul in man as an immortal essence, saying that it is an image of God, or rather was made after the image of God. "For God said," he says, "Let us make man in conformity with our image and likeness. And God made man: according to the image of God he made him."

27.2| And next, dividing the composite man by his account into the visible body and the part understood as soul, he adds: "Then God took dust from the earth and fashioned the man, and blew the breath of life into his face, and the man came to be a living soul.

27.3| Moreover, he says that man was made a ruler and king over all things on earth. For his words are: "And God declared: Let us make man according to our own image and likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and the birds of heaven, and the cattle and all the earth. And God made man in his image; he made him after God's image.

27.4| In what other way could an image of God and a likeness be conceived than in terms of the powers in God and of likeness in virtue? Listen, then, to what Plato says in the Alcibiades on this very point, as though he had been a disciple of Moses:

27.5| "Can we say, then, what is more divine in the soul than that part about which knowing and thinking are? We cannot. So that part of it resembles God; and one who looks at this, and comes to know all that is divine, God and wisdom, would in this way come to know himself best. Evidently. Now, just as mirrors are clearer and purer and brighter than the mirror in the eye, so God happens to be purer and brighter than the best part of our soul? So it seems, Socrates. Then by looking to God we would be using that finest mirror, and among human things we would look to the soul's excellence, and in this way we would see and know ourselves best. Yes."

27.6| This is from the Alcibiades. But hear how he sets out the matter more fully in the work On the Soul, in the relevant passages. "Shall we posit, if you like, he said, two kinds of beings, the one visible, the other unseen? Let us posit them, he said. And the unseen always the same, the visible never the same? This too, he said, let us posit.

27.7| Come now, he said, is there anything else to ourselves than that one part is body and the other soul? Nothing else, he said. To which, then, would we say the body is more like in form and more akin? Clearly, he said, to the visible. And the soul: is it visible or unseen? Not by human beings, Socrates, he said. But we were speaking of the visible and the not visible in relation to human nature; or do you think in relation to some other? To human nature.

27.8| What then do we say about the soul: that it is visible or invisible? Not visible. Unseen, then? Yes. The soul, then, is more like the unseen, and the body like the visible. Of necessity, Socrates.

27.9| Now we were saying this long ago too: that when the soul makes use of the body to examine something, whether through seeing or hearing or any other sense (for this is what it is to examine something through the body, to do so through sense), then it is dragged by the body toward things that are never the same; and it itself wanders and is confused and reels as if drunk, since it is in contact with such things. Quite so.

27.10| But when it examines by itself, it goes off yonder, to what is pure and always existing and deathless and always the same; and as being akin to it, it is always with that whenever it comes to be by itself and is allowed to, and it ceases from its wandering and remains always the same and in the same state in relation to those things, since it is in contact with such things. This state of the soul is named wisdom.

27.11| You speak altogether well and truly, Socrates, he said. To which kind, then, does the soul seem to you to be more like and more akin, both from what was said before and from what is being said now? Everyone, I think, Socrates, he said, even the slowest learner, would agree from this line of argument that the soul is wholly and entirely more like what is always the same than what is not.

27.12| And the body? To the other. Look at it this way too: when soul and body are together, nature prescribes to the one to serve and be ruled, to the other to rule and be master. By this test again, which seems to you to resemble the divine, and which the mortal? Does it not seem to you that the divine is by nature suited to rule and lead, while the mortal is suited to be ruled and to serve? It does to me.

27.13| Which, then, does the soul resemble? Clearly, Socrates, the soul resembles the divine, and the body the mortal. Consider, Cebes, he said, whether from all that has been said this follows for us: that the soul is most like the divine and deathless and intelligible and uniform and indissoluble and always the same in itself, while the body in turn is most like the human and mortal and unintelligent and multiform and dissoluble and never the same in itself.

27.14| Can we say anything else against this, my friend Cebes, to show that the case is otherwise? We cannot. What then? This being so, is it not natural for the body to be quickly dissolved, and for the soul to be altogether indissoluble, or nearly so?

27.15| Of course. Do you observe, then, he said, that when a man dies, the visible part of him, the body, lying in a visible place, which we call a corpse, and which is bound to be dissolved and fall apart and be dispersed, does not at once suffer any of these things, but remains for quite a long time; and if someone dies with his body in good condition and at such an age, for a very long time indeed. For when the body has collapsed and been preserved, as the embalmed in Egypt are, it stays almost whole for an incredible time. And some parts of the body, even if they rot, bones and sinews and all such things, are nevertheless, so to speak, deathless; or are they not? Yes.

27.16| And the soul, then (the unseen, which goes off to another place of that kind, noble and pure and unseen, to Hades in truth, to the good and wise god, where, if god is willing, my own soul too must soon go), will this soul of ours, being of such a kind and nature, be scattered and destroyed as soon as it is released from the body, as the many say?

27.17| Far from it, dear Cebes and Simmias; much rather it is like this. If it is released pure, dragging nothing of the body with it, since it had no willing communion with it in life, but fled from it and gathered itself into itself, since it was always practicing this (and this is nothing other than philosophizing rightly and practicing in truth how to die with ease; or would this not be practice for death? Altogether so.)

27.18| Then, being in this state, it goes off to what is like itself, the invisible, the divine, deathless and wise; and when it arrives there, it is its lot to be happy, freed from wandering and folly and fears and wild passions and the other evils of human life, and, as is said of the initiated, truly to spend the rest of time with gods. Shall we say so, Cebes, or otherwise? So, by Zeus, said Cebes.

27.19| But if, I think, it is released defiled and impure, since it was always with the body and attended to it and loved it and was bewitched by it, by its desires and pleasures, so that nothing else seemed true to it but the bodily, which one could touch, and look at, and eat, and drink, and employ for sexual pleasures; while what is dark to the eyes and unseen, but intelligible and to be grasped by philosophy, this it was accustomed to hate and tremble at and flee; do you think a soul in this condition will be released pure and by itself? Not in the least, he said."

27.20| So Plato. Porphyry spreads out the thought in the first book of the work he wrote Against Boethus, On the Soul, writing as follows:

28.1| "Take, for example, the argument that seemed strong to Plato for establishing the soul's immortality, the one from likeness. For if it is like the divine, deathless, unseen, undispersed, indissoluble, possessed of real essence and standing in incorruption, how would it not be of the same kind as the pattern?

28.2| For when two extremes are plainly opposite, such as the rational and the irrational, and some third thing is disputed as to which side it belongs to, there was this one way of proof too, by showing which of the opposites it resembles. For in this way, although the human race was held in irrationality in its first age, and many continue to the end of old age abounding in the faults of irrationality, nevertheless, because it bears many likenesses to the purely rational, this race was believed from the start to be rational.

28.3| Since, then, the order of the gods is divine and unmixed and plainly immortal, while that of the earthly is just as plainly dissoluble and lies in corruption, and since the soul is disputed by some as to which of the two parts set before it it has gone over to, Plato thought that the truth must be tracked from likeness.

28.4| And since it is in no way like the mortal and dissoluble and unintelligent and lifeless, and therefore tangible and perceptible and subject to becoming and perishing, but is like the divine and deathless and unseen and intellectual, living and akin to truth, and in all the respects he reasons out about it, it seemed wrong to grant that the other likenesses to God are present in it while refusing to allow it the resemblance in essence, which is the very reason it has come to share in these too.

28.5| For just as things unlike God in their activities are at once different also in the make-up of their essence, so it follows that things that share somehow in the same activities have already acquired likeness of essence. For the activities, too, are of a certain quality because of the quality of the essence, as flowing from it and being its offshoots."

28.6| Now hear what Boethus has done to remove the force of this argument, writing at the very beginning of his discourse as follows:

28.7| "Whether the soul is immortal and a nature superior to all destruction, one must make a pronouncement only after waiting through and going around many arguments.

28.8| That nothing among the things around us resembles God more than the soul does, however, one would believe without much trouble, not only from the continuous and unceasing motion which it gives to us, but from the mind that is within it by itself.

28.9| It was with a view to this that the natural philosopher of Croton too said that it is immortal and by nature flees all rest, like the divine bodies.

28.10| Indeed, on the whole, the form of the soul, and above all the mind that rules in us, with what great counsels and what impulses it often stirs, would show to one who considers it a great likeness to God."

28.11| And next he adds: "For if the soul is demonstrated to be most like the divine of all things, what further need is there to go on seeking other arguments to prove its immortality, by way of preamble, and not to count this one, as one among the many, as sufficient to put the well-disposed to shame, since it would not have shared in activities resembling the divine unless it were itself divine?

28.12| For if, though buried in what is mortal, dissoluble, unintelligent, dead in itself, always perishing and flowing away into the change of destruction, it both makes it and holds it together, and shows its own divine essence, even though it is overshadowed and hindered by the wholly perishable molding set before it, how, if it were separated by reason, like gold from the clay molded around it, would it not at once reveal its own form, not only as resembling God alone but as sharing in him, and preserving the likenesses in its activities even in its most mortal part, as when it is shut up in the mortal, and for this reason not being dissolved, because it was of a nature without share in corruption?"

28.13| And a little further on he says: "With reason it appears both divine, from its likening to the indivisible, and mortal, from the things it approaches; it goes down and up, and is mortal in form and yet like the immortals.

28.14| For a human being is also he who stuffs himself and strives to be sated like the beasts; but a human being too is he who by knowledge is able to save a ship at sea in danger, and who saves in sickness, and who finds the truth, and works methodically toward the grasp of knowledge, discovering fire-drills and the observations of sundials, and devising imitations of the works of the Maker.

28.15| For it was a human being who conceived the idea of producing on earth the conjunctions of the seven with their motions, imitating by contrivances what is in heaven. And what has he not conceived, demonstrating the divine mind in himself, equal to God?

28.16| By these things, revealing the daring of an Olympian and divine being and in no way mortal, he has persuaded the many, who because of their self-love incline downward and cannot see him, to think him mortal-like in form, judging from external appearances as they themselves are; and this is one means of consolation for their vice, namely, taking comfort in setting their own wretchedness against others on the strength of external appearances, to persuade themselves that as to the outside and the inside all men are alike."

28.17| Of all these things Moses has appeared as the teacher: going through the first origin of man in the words set before us, he established, through the likening to the divine, the arguments for the immortality of the soul.

28.18| But since the doctrines about the bodiless and invisible essence have been shown to be in harmony and agreement between Moses and Plato, it is time to look also at the remaining parts of the philosophy of Plato, and to show the man to be a friend of the Hebrews in everything, unless somewhere he turned aside and was led to say something more human than the true account allows.

28.19| Thus, of what he has said, whatever he said correctly would run together with what Moses held, while whatever he took up that does not please Moses and the prophets would not have a sound argument. This will be demonstrated to us at the proper time. For the present, since the positions have been found to be in tune and in agreement in the contemplation of the intelligible things, it is time to return again to the natural science of perceptible things and run briefly over the man's agreement with the Hebrews.

29.1| Moses declared that this whole universe was generated, having come into being from God. He says, then, at the beginning of his writing: "In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth," then after this he adds in detail: "This is the book of the genesis of heaven and earth, when it came to be, on the day when God made the heaven and the earth." Hear how Plato does not fall short of this thought, writing himself somewhat as follows:

29.2| "Everything that comes to be, in turn, necessarily comes to be by some cause; for it is wholly impossible for anything to have genesis without a cause."

29.3| And he adds: "As for the whole heaven, or world, or whatever other name it would most readily accept, let us call it so; we must first consider about it what is proposed as the thing to consider at the beginning about everything: whether it always was, having no beginning of genesis, or has come to be, starting from some beginning.

29.4| It has come to be; for it is visible, can be touched, and has a body. All such things are perceptible, and perceptibles, grasped by opinion, were shown to be generated. And of what has come to be we say that it must come to be by some cause. Now to find the creator and Maker of this universe is a hard task, and having found him, to tell of him to all is impossible."

29.5| And again next he says: "In this way, then, according to the likely account, one must say that this world came to be a living creature, endowed with soul and mind, in truth through the providence of God."

30.1| Again, Moses taught that these bodies too are generated, by what he said: "And God said, Let luminaries come to be in the firmament of heaven, so as to give light on the earth; and let them serve for signs and seasons and days and years. And God made the two great luminaries and the stars; and he placed them in the firmament of heaven.

30.2| Likewise Plato says: "From such reasoning and thought of God directed to the generation of time, so that time might come into being, the sun and moon and five other stars, called by the name of wanderers, came into being for the distinguishing and guarding of the numbers of time. And God, having made their bodies, set them in their orbits."

30.3| Observe whether Plato's phrase "from reasoning and purpose of God" is not like what is said among the Hebrews: "Through the Lord's word the heavens were established, and through the breath of his mouth all their powers." And in Moses' words, "and he set them in the firmament," the word is matched by Plato too, who used the like expression "set," saying, "God, having made their bodies, set them in their orbits."

31.1| The scripture of the Hebrews declares at each of the works of creation that "God saw that it was good," and in summing up the whole says, "And God saw all things, and behold, they were very good." Hear what Plato says: "If this world is beautiful and its Maker good, it is clear that he looked to the eternal." And again: "For it is the most beautiful of the things that have come to be, and he the best of causes."

32.1| And of this the whole scripture of the Hebrews speaks, at one time in what it says, "And the heaven will be rolled up like a scroll," at another in what it adds, "And there shall be a new heaven and a new earth, which I make to remain before me, says the Lord," and again at another time in what it says, "For the form of this world is passing away."

32.2| Plato too: hear at any rate how he establishes the doctrine, saying in the Timaeus: "And he constructed a heaven visible and tangible; and for these reasons, and from these and such elements, four in number, the world's body was generated, agreeing by proportion, and it gained friendship from them, so that, having come together into the same, it could be dissolved by no one except the one who bound it together."

32.3| Then he says next: "Time, then, came to be along with heaven, so that, having been generated together, they might be dissolved together, if ever there should be a dissolution of them."

32.4| And again, having said, "Gods of gods, of whom I am Maker and father of works which, having come to be through me, are indissoluble unless I wish it," he adds next: "Now everything that has been bound can be dissolved; yet to wish to dissolve what is beautifully fitted together and in good state is the part of an evil one. Therefore, since you have come to be, you are not immortal nor wholly indissoluble. Yet you will certainly not be dissolved, nor will you meet the fate of death, since you have obtained my will, a greater and more sovereign bond than those with which you were bound together when you came to be."

32.5| And in the Statesman the same writer says this: "For this universe at one time God himself accompanies in its course and turns round with it, and at another lets it go, when its revolutions have taken the measure of time proper to it, and it of its own accord is turned round again in the opposite direction, being a living creature that received intelligence from the one who fitted it together in the beginning. And this reversal has become innate in it by necessity. For what reason?

32.6| To remain always in the same state and in the same way, and to be the same, belongs only to the most divine of all things; the nature of body is not of this order. What we have named heaven and world has received many blessed gifts from its begetter, yet it also has a share in body; hence it is impossible for it to be wholly free of change; but so far as it can, it moves in the same place and in the same way with a single motion, since it has been assigned the revolution that involves the least variation of its own movement. For to turn itself always is possible for almost nothing except the leader of all things that move; and it is not right for him to move anything at one time one way and then in the opposite way.

32.7| From all these considerations, then, one must say neither that the world turns itself always, nor that it is turned as a whole by God in two opposite revolutions, nor again that two gods with opposed intentions turn it; but what was just said, and is the only remaining possibility: that at one time it is accompanied by another, divine cause, regaining life and receiving from its Maker an immortality restored anew, and at another, when it is released, it goes by itself in its own time, released in such a state as to go backward through many myriads of revolutions, because, being the greatest and most evenly balanced, it moves on the smallest foot.

32.8| It appears, then, that all you have gone through has been said very reasonably. Let us reflect, then, and understand from what has now been said the condition which we declared to be the cause of all the marvelous things. For it is this very thing.

32.9| What is it? That the motion of the universe is at one time carried in the direction in which it now revolves, at another in the opposite. How so? One must consider this change as the greatest and most perfect of all the turnings that occur around the heaven.

32.10| So it seems. We must suppose, then, that the greatest changes then occur to us who dwell within it. That too is likely. And great changes, many and of every kind occurring together, do we not know that the nature of living creatures endures them with difficulty?

32.11| How could it not? Then the greatest destructions necessarily occur at that time among the other living creatures, and of the human race too only a small part is left. Among these, many other experiences, wonderful and strange, befall them, but the greatest is this, which accompanies the unwinding of the universe, at the moment when the turning opposite to the present arrangement comes about." After all this, going on next to the coming back to life of the dead, moved in the same way as the opinions of the Hebrews, he adds this:

33.1| "What was the generation of living creatures then, stranger, and in what manner were they born of one another?

33.2| Clearly, Socrates, birth from one another did not occur in the nature of that time; rather the earth-born race, which is said once to have existed, was that which at that time came back again from the earth, and it was remembered by our earliest ancestors, who lived next to the end of the former revolution, in the time immediately following, and were born at the beginning of this one; for these men became heralds to us of those accounts which many now wrongly disbelieve.

33.3| For one must, I think, understand what follows. It is a consequence of the old men going back to the nature of a child, that those of the dead who are laid in the earth are formed again there and come back to life, following the reversal, as generation turns back with the revolution in the opposite direction, and that they are necessarily born from the earth in this way, so that they have this name and account, all whom God did not carry away to another lot. Entirely, then, this follows from what went before."

33.4| Then again, going on further, he describes in this way things like the doctrines of the Hebrews about the consummation of the world:

34.1| "When the time of all these things was completed and a change had to occur, and when indeed the whole earthborn race had already been used up, every soul having rendered all its births, and having fallen into the earth as seeds as many times as had been ordained for each, then the helmsman of the universe, letting go the handle of the rudders, as it were, withdrew to his own watchtower, and fate and innate desire turned the world back again.

34.2| All the gods, then, who in their several places shared rule with the greatest spirit, having perceived what was happening, let go the parts of the world from their care. And the world, turning about and colliding, driven by an impulse opposite at its beginning and its end, causing a great shaking within itself, brought about yet another destruction of living creatures of every kind.

34.3| After this, when sufficient time had gone by, it ceased from tumult and confusion and from the quakings, and, gaining calm, it went on, set in order, in its customary course, having care and mastery of what is in it and of itself."

34.4| And after a little he says again: "Therefore at that moment the god who had set it in order, seeing it in difficulty and concerned lest, storm-tossed by confusion, it be dissolved and sink into the boundless region of unlikeness, took his seat again at its rudders, and turned back what had grown sick and been loosened in its former revolution under its own power, set it in order, and by putting it right made it deathless and ageless. This has been said as the end of all.

35.1| "Now these things," I said, "are nothing in number or in greatness compared with what awaits each after death; but they must be heard, so that each of them may fully receive the things owed to them by the account.

35.2| "Tell them," he said, "for there are not many things I would more gladly hear." "Yet I shall not tell you," I said, "a tale of Alcinous, but of a valiant man, Er, son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by race, who once died in war; and when on the tenth day the dead, already decayed, were picked up, he was picked up sound, and when he was carried home and about to be buried, on the twelfth day, lying on the pyre, he came back to life, and having come back to life he told what he had seen there.

35.3| He said that when his soul went out of him it traveled with many, and they came to a certain divine place, in which there were two openings in the earth, next to each other, and in the heaven above others opposite them.

35.4| Between these sat judges, who, when they had given judgment, ordered the just to travel by the road on the right and upward through the heaven, after fastening signs on them of the judgments passed on them in front, and the unjust by the road on the left and downward, these too having on their backs signs of all that they had done.

35.5| When he himself came forward, they said he must become a messenger to human beings of the things there, and they charged him to listen and to watch everything in the place."

35.6| This is Plato. Plutarch records things akin to these somewhat as follows in the first book On the Soul:

36.1| "This Antyllus we ourselves attended; but let us relate it to Sositeles and Heracleon. Having recently fallen ill, he seemed to the doctors past hope of living; but recovering a little from some unsteady lapse into stupor, he did and said nothing at all out of his mind, but said that he had died, and been released again, and was not at all to die of that sickness, and that the men who had brought him had been rebuked by their lord; for they had been sent for Nicandas, and had come bringing him instead of that man. Nicandas was a cobbler, and otherwise a man who had frequented the wrestling schools and was familiar and well known to many. Whereupon the young men came up and teased him as one who had run away and corrupted the attendants there. He himself was plainly disturbed at once and put out; and in the end a fever attacked him and he suddenly died on the third day. But Antyllus came back to life, and he lives on in good health, the most considerate of our guests."

36.2| Let this be set down by me because the revival of the dead is also recorded in the scriptures of the Hebrews. And since they also contain promises that a land will be given to the God-beloved alone, in accordance with the saying, "The meek shall inherit the earth," and the saying makes plain that this land is heavenly, "But the Jerusalem above is free, who is our mother"; and since the prophet speaks in riddling allegory of this same city as composed of costly and precious stones, in the words: "Behold, I prepare for you a carbuncle as your stone, and I will make your battlements jasper, and your foundations sapphire, and your enclosure choice stones"; see how Plato too, in the work On the Soul, admits that these very things, or similar ones, are to be believed true, assigning the account to Socrates somewhat as follows:

37.1| "But indeed, Simmias, it does not seem to me to be the art of Glaucus to relate what these things are; that they are true seems to me harder than the art of Glaucus can manage. For one thing, I perhaps would not be able; and for another, even if I knew, my life, Simmias, seems to me not long enough for the length of the account. Yet the form of the earth, such as I am persuaded it is, and its regions, nothing prevents me from describing. Well, said Simmias, that too is enough.

37.2| I am persuaded, then, he said, first, that if it is in the middle of the heaven and spherical, it has no need of air to keep it from falling, nor of any other such necessity, but that the likeness of the heaven to itself in every direction, and the earth's own equipoise, suffice to hold it; for a thing in equipoise, placed in the middle of something uniform, will have no cause to lean more to one side or less to another, but being in a similar state it remains unmoved.

37.3| This, then, he said, is what I am first persuaded of. And rightly, said Simmias. Further, he said, that it is very large, and that we who live from the Phasis to the Pillars of Heracles inhabit a small portion of it, like ants or frogs around a pond, dwelling about the sea, and that many others live elsewhere in many such places.

37.4| For all around the earth there are many hollows of every shape and size, into which water and mist and air have flowed together; yet the earth itself lies pure in the pure heaven, in which the stars are, which most of those accustomed to speak of such things call aether; these things are its dregs and flow always into the hollows of the earth.

37.5| We, then, who live in its hollows, are unaware of it and think that we live up on the earth, as if someone living in the middle of the sea-bed should think he lived on the sea, and, seeing through the water the sun and the other stars, should think the sea to be heaven, and through slowness and weakness had never reached the surface of the sea, nor had seen, by emerging and lifting his head out of the sea into this place, how much purer and more beautiful it is than the one among them, nor had heard of it from anyone else who had seen.

37.6| This is just what has happened to us: dwelling in some hollow of the earth, we think we live on top of it, and call the air heaven, as though the stars moved through this as heaven. And it is the same, in that through weakness and slowness we are unable to pass through to the outermost reach of the air; for if anyone came to its top, or took wing and flew up, he would look out by lifting his head, just as fish here, lifting their heads out of the sea, see what is here, so he would see what is there; and if his nature had strength to bear the sight, he would know that that is the true heaven, the true light, and the truly real earth.

37.7| For this earth of ours, with its stones and this whole region, is corrupted and eaten away, as things in the sea are by the brine; and nothing worth mentioning grows in the sea, nor is anything, so to speak, perfect, but there are caverns and sand and endless mud and mire, wherever there is earth too, and they are in no way worthy to be judged against the beautiful things among us.

37.8| But those things would appear yet much more to surpass the things among us. For if it is good to tell a tale, it is worth hearing, Simmias, what the things on the earth beneath the heaven are like. Indeed, said Simmias, Socrates, we would gladly hear this tale.

37.9| It is said, then, my friend, he said, first of all that the earth itself, if one looks at it from above, is like the twelve-patched balls: variegated, marked off in colors, of which the colors here are like samples, those the painters use; but there the whole earth is made of such colors, and of ones even brighter and purer than these.

37.10| For one part is purple, wonderful in beauty, another gold-colored, another all white, whiter than gypsum or snow, and it is composed likewise of the other colors, and of still more and fairer ones than all we have seen.

37.11| For these very hollows of it, full of water and air, present a kind of color, gleaming amid the variety of the other colors, so that a single continuous and variegated appearance of it is presented.

37.12| On this earth, being of such a kind, trees and flowers grow in proportion, bearing their fruits; and likewise the mountains and the stones have, by the same reckoning, smoothness and transparency and fairer colors; of which the little stones here that are so prized are fragments, sards and jaspers and emeralds and all such; but there nothing at all is not of this kind, and even fairer than these.

37.13| The reason is that those stones are pure, neither eaten away nor corrupted as the ones here are, by decay and brine and the things that have flowed together here, which bring ugliness and diseases upon stones and earth and the other animals and plants. And the earth itself is adorned with all these and also with gold and silver and the other such things. For they lie in plain view, naturally, in great and abundant quantities, and in many places on the earth, so that it must be a sight for blessed spectators."

38.1| The scripture of the Hebrews foretells a tribunal of God and a judgment of souls after departure from here, by countless other passages and by what it says: "The court sat, and books were laid open, and the Ancient of Days sat. A river of fire drew out before him; ten thousand times ten thousand served him, and a thousand thousands stood before him." Hear Plato on the divine judgment, who also mentions the river by name, and outlines many dwellings for the pious and various punishments for the impious in agreement with the words of the Hebrews.

38.2| In the work On the Soul he says this: "A third river issues between these, and near its issuing it falls into a great region burning with much fire, and makes a lake larger than our sea, seething with water and mud; from there it goes round in a circle, turbid and muddy, and winding around the earth it arrives elsewhere and also at the edges of the Acherusian lake, without mixing with its water; and after winding many times under the earth it pours in below Tartarus.

38.3| This is the one they call Pyriphlegethon, whose streams blow out fragments wherever they happen to be on the earth. Opposite this the fourth river falls into a region at first terrible and wild, it is said, having a color altogether like lapis lazuli, which they call Stygian, and the lake which the river makes by flowing in they call Styx. And falling in there and receiving terrible powers in its water, it sinks under the earth and winds around, going in the direction opposite to Pyriphlegethon, and meets it on the opposite side at the Acherusian lake; and its water too mixes with none, but it also, going round in a circle, falls into Tartarus opposite Pyriphlegethon; and its name, as the poets say, is Cocytus.

38.4| "Such being the nature of these things, when the dead reach the place to which each is led by his guardian spirit, first they are judged, both those who have lived well and holily and justly and those who have not. Those who are judged to have lived a middling life set out for the Acheron, embark on the vessels that are there for them, and on these they reach the lake; there they dwell and are purified, and by paying the penalty for their wrongdoings they are absolved, if anyone has done wrong, and each receives, according to his desert, rewards for his good deeds. But those judged incurable on account of the magnitude of their sins, having committed many great acts of temple-robbery, or many unjust and lawless murders, or whatever other deeds are of that kind, these the fitting lot hurls into Tartarus, from which they never come out.

38.5| Those who are judged to have committed sins that are curable, yet great, such as having done some violence to father or mother in anger and then living the rest of their life in remorse, or who have become killers of men in some other such way, these must fall into Tartarus; but when they have fallen in and been there a year, the wave casts them out, the killers of men by way of Cocytus, those who struck father or mother by way of Pyriphlegethon. And when they are carried along to the Acherusian lake, there they shout and call out, some to those they killed, others to those they outraged; and having called them, they beg and implore them to allow them to come out into the lake. If they win them over, they come out and are released from their sufferings; if not, they are carried back again into Tartarus, and from there once more into the rivers, and they do not cease suffering this until they persuade those they wronged; for this is the penalty laid down for them by the judges.

38.6| But those who are judged to have been outstanding in living a holy life, these are the ones who are freed and released from these regions within the earth as from prisons, and who arrive above at the pure dwelling-place and make their home upon the earth. And of these, those who have been sufficiently purified by philosophy live without toil altogether for all time to come, and arrive at dwellings still fairer than these, whose description is neither easy nor is the time sufficient at present. But for the sake of the things we have gone through, Simmias, one must do everything to have a share in virtue and wisdom in this life; for the prize is fair and the hope is great."

38.7| So Plato. You, for your part, will set beside the words "and they arrive at fairer dwellings, which are neither easy to explain, nor is the time sufficient at present" the passage among us that runs thus: "For eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and it has not ascended into a human heart—what God has prepared for those who love him";

38.8| and beside the dwellings he spoke of, the many abodes with the Father promised to those who love God; and beside what was said about Pyriphlegethon, the eternal fire threatened against the ungodly, as the prophet of the Hebrews says to them: "Who will tell you that a fire is burning? Who will tell you of the eternal place?" and again: "Their worm will not die, and their fire will not be put out, and they will be a spectacle to all flesh."

38.9| Observe, too, how Plato agrees with these: having said that the ungodly will go into Tartarus, he adds, "from which they never come out." And again, having said that the godly will live among the blessed, he adds the words "altogether, and for all time to come." And his phrase "without toil" would be like the words "pain and grief and sighing have fled away."

38.10| And when he says that those who set out for the Acheron do not simply arrive at it, but first embark on the vessels that are there for them, what can he mean by the vessels but the bodies, which the souls of the dead enter and with which they are punished, in accordance with what is held among the Hebrews? But since this book too has reached a sufficient conclusion, I shall move on to book twelve of the Preparation for the Gospel.

Cite a passage by its number: every paragraph here has its own anchor (for example https://openscriptorium.com/read/eusebius/085-preparation-for-the-gospel-book-xi#p1), and the bracketed reference numbers link the same way.

← All of Eusebius of Caesarea: The Works of Eusebius of Caesarea