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{ |
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"title": "On Rewards and Punishments", |
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"language": "en", |
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"versionTitle": "merged", |
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"versionSource": "https://www.sefaria.org/On_Rewards_and_Punishments", |
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"text": { |
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"Introduction": [ |
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"ON REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS (DE PRAEMIIS ET POENIS) <br>INTRODUCTION TO <i>DE PRAEMIIS ET POENIS</i>", |
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"The treatise begins with some remarks on the scheme on which Moses constructed his law book (1–3) and how it was observed by some and disregarded by others (4–6). Coming to the main subject of the rewards for obedience and punishments for disobedience he notes that those described in the history may be classified under individuals, houses or groups, cities, countries and nations, and larger regions (7). We take the rewards to individuals and start with the less perfect Trinity, Enos, Enoch and Noah, who exemplify respectively hopefulness, repentance and justice. Hope is the motive of all human effort and hope in God is its only true form (8–13). Enos the hoper was rewarded with a name which means that he is a true man (14). Enoch’s repentance is rewarded by his “transference” away from the common herd to the isolation which the converted need (15–21). Noah the just was saved from the flood and made the founder of renewed mankind (22–23). The second Trinity, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, represent the true religion which despises vanity (24–27). Abraham the <i>Taught</i> learnt to believe in God and his reward was faith (28–30). Isaac the <i>Self-taught</i> instinctively rejoiced in all God’s dispensations and his reward was joy (31–35). Jacob the <i>Practiser</i> sought to see God, not merely to infer him from his works, and his reward was the vision indicated by his name of Israel (36–46) and also the spiritual qualities signified in the “numbing of the broad part” (47–48). These lessons are recapitulated (49–51). But we must not forget Moses and his fourfold reward of kingship, lawgiving, prophecy and priesthood (52–56).", |
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"We pass on to rewards to “houses.” Abraham and Isaac had families which contained some unworthy members: Jacob’s children alone as a body were qualified for the reward, namely the privilege of founding the twelve tribes which expanded into a great nation (57–62 and 66); incidentally we may draw a philosophical lesson from the three families as types of the children or qualities shown by the three types of soul (61–65).", |
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"We then turn to the punishments of which only two examples are given in what has come down to us. First, for individuals we have Cain, whose punishment was to be ever dying, never dead, carrying on an existence from which joy and pleasure have been eliminated and in which not only permanent grief but fear of what is coming are perpetually present (67–73). For houses we have the revolt of the Levites under Korah. Their offence is described, but the story of their punishment is lost by a break in the manuscripts (74–78); for the possibilities at this point see App. p. 455.", |
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"When the discourse, as we have it, is resumed we have come to the blessings promised in the law to the righteous. The first is victory over enemies, but before discussing who these enemies are he urges the necessity of not merely hearing but carrying out the law (79–84). The enemies are of two kinds, wild beasts and men; when men become what they should be, the beasts will also be tamed and men will eschew war with each other (85–92). War will either never come or if some still are mad enough to attack, they will be routed at once, and good government will be established (93–97). The second blessing is wealth, and many passages are cited which describe the abundance that is to be (98–107). The third is long life, and to this is appended the thought that the true long life is the good life, to which God may recall the human soul even as he promises to recall the repentant exiles (108–117). These four are external blessings; for the body there is promised the exemption from disease in which the good mind can rest and think (118–126).", |
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"He then turns to punishment or curses, all of which closely follow Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The first is famine, drought and destruction of every kind of crop by nature if not by enemy (127–133), followed by all the horrors of cannibalism (134), miseries which they will be unable to escape by suicide (135–136); enslavement with all its miseries (137–140); a curse resting not only on the land and fruits but on all undertakings (141–142); bodily diseases of every kind (143–146); the terrors of war, panic, wild beasts, destruction of cities and finally utter despair (147–151). Meanwhile the proselytes will prosper, thus teaching the lesson that it is not race but obedience which brings salvation (152). He then descants on the sabbaths which according to Leviticus the desolate land will enjoy. It had been wronged by the neglect of the sabbatical years, and will now take its rest and then after a while may produce a better race (153–158). This reminds him of the text “She that is desolate hath many children,” a saying which can be applied allegorically to the converted soul which has been deserted by its vices and brings forth virtues (159–161).", |
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"So much for the punishments, but there is also the promise of restoration to the penitent and a renewal of the national life in greater prosperity than ever (162–168); the curses will be turned upon the persecutors, who will find that their victory was transient and that the race which they despised had still a seed from which new life would spring (169–172).", |
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"ON REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS (AND CURSES)" |
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], |
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"": [ |
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[ |
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"[1] The oracles delivered through the prophet Moses are of three kinds. The first deals with the creation of the world, the second with history and the third with legislation. The story of the creation is told throughout with an excellence worthy of the divine subject, beginning with the genesis of Heaven and ending with the framing of man. For Heaven is the most perfect of things indestructible as man of things mortal, immortal and mortal being the original components out of which the Creator wrought the world, the one created then and there to take command, the other subject, as it were, to be also created in the future.", |
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"[2] The historical part is a record of good and bad lives and of the sentences passed in each generation on both, rewards in one case, punishments in the other.", |
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"The legislative part has two divisions, one in which the subject matter is more general, the other consisting of the ordinances of specific laws. On the one hand there are the ten heads or summaries which we are told were not delivered through a spokesman but were shaped high above in the air into the form of articulate speech: on the other the specific ordinances of the oracles given through the lips of a prophet.", |
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"[3] All these and further the virtues which he assigned to peace and war have been discussed as fully as was needful in the preceding treatises, and I now proceed in due course to the rewards and punishments which the good and the bad have respectively to expect.", |
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"[4] After having schooled the citizens of his polity with gentle instructions and exhortations and more sternly with threats and warnings he called on them to make a practical exhibition of what they had learned. They advanced as it were into the sacred arena and showed the spirit in which they would act bared ready for the contest, to the end that its sincerity might be tested beyond doubt.", |
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"[5] Then it was found that the true athletes of virtue did not disappoint the high hopes of the laws which had trained them, but the unmanly whose souls were degenerate through inbred weakness, without waiting for any stronger counter-force to overpower them, dropped down, a source of shame to themselves and derision to the spectators.", |
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"[6] And therefore, while the former enjoyed the prizes and laudatory announcements and all the other tributes which are paid to the victors, the latter departed not only without a crown but with the stigma of a defeat more grievous than those sustained in the gymnastic contests. For there the athletes’ bodies are brought low but can easily stand once more erect. Here it is whole lives that fall, which once overthrown can hardly be raised up again.", |
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"[7] The lessons which he gives on privilege, and honour, and on the other hand on punishments fall under heads arranged in an orderly series, individual men, families, cities, countries and nations, vast regions of the earth." |
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], |
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[ |
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"We must first examine what is said of honours, as both more profitable and more pleasant to listen to, and we will begin with the honour paid to each single and particular individual.", |
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"[8] The Greeks say that the primeval hero Triptolemus borne aloft on winged dragons sowed the corn-seed over the whole earth, in order that in place of the acorns which had been their food the human race might have a kindly, wholesome and exceedingly palatable means of nourishment. Now this story like many others is a mythical fable and may be left to those whose way is to deal in marvels and cultivate sophistry rather than wisdom, and imposture rather than truth.", |
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"[9] For from the beginning at the first creation of all things God provided beforehand, raised from the earth, what was necessary for all living animals and particularly for the human race to which he granted sovereignty over all earthborn creatures. For none of the works of God is of later birth, but all that seems to be accomplished by human skill and industry in later time was there by the foresight of nature lying ready half made, thus justifying the saying that learning is recollection.", |
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"[10] But this is not a point for our present discussion. What we have to consider is that most vital form of seed which the Creator sowed in the rich soil of the rational soul.", |
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"[11] And the first thing thus sown is hope, the fountain head of the lives which we lead. In hope of gain the tradesman arms himself for the manifold forms of money getting. In hope of a successful voyage the skipper crosses the wide open seas. In hope of glory the ambitious man chooses political life and the charge of public affairs. The hope of prizes and crowns moves the training athlete to endure the contests of the arena. The hope of happiness incites also the devotees of virtue to study wisdom, believing that thus they will be able to discern the nature of all that exists and to act in accordance with nature and so bring to their fullness the best types of life, the contemplative and the practical, which necessarily make their possessor a happy man.", |
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"[12] Now some have acted like enemies in war to the germs of hope, and consumed them in the fire of the vices which they have kindled in the soul or like careless husbandmen have through their laziness allowed them to perish. There are others who seem to have guarded them well but have clung to self-assertion rather than piety and regarded themselves as the source of their achievements.", |
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"[13] All these are to be condemned. He alone is worthy of approval who sets his hope on God both as the source to which his coming into existence itself is due and as the sole power which can keep him free from harm and destruction. What reward then is offered to the winner of the Crown in this contest? It is that living being whose nature is a mixture of the mortal and immortal, even man, not the same man nor yet another than the winner.", |
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"[14] The Hebrew name for him is Enos, and Enos translated into Greek is ἄνθρωπος or man. He takes the name which is common to the whole race as his personal name, a reward of special distinction implying that no one should be thought a man at all who does not set his hope on God." |
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[ |
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"[15] After the victory of hope comes the second contest, in which repentance is the champion. Repentance has nothing of that nature which remains ever in the same stay without movement or change. It has been suddenly possessed with an ardent yearning for betterment, eager to leave its inbred covetousness and injustice and come over to soberness and justice and the other virtues.", |
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"[16] Repentance also has two rewards assigned to its double achievement in abandoning the base and choosing the excellent. These rewards are a new home and a life of solitude; for he says of him who fled from the insurgency of the body to join the forces of the soul “he was not found because God transferred him.”", |
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"[17] By “transference” he clearly signifies the new home and by “not found” the life of solitude. Very pertinently too. For if a man has really come to despise pleasures and desires and resolved in all sincerity to take his stand above the passions, he must prepare for a change of abode and flee from home and country and kinsfolk and friends without a backward glance.", |
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"[18] For great is the attraction of familiarity. We may fear that if he stays he may be cut off and captured by all the love charms which surround him and will call up visions to stir again the base practices which had lain dormant and create vivid memories of what it were well to have forgotten.", |
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"[19] Many persons in fact have come to a wiser mind by leaving their country and have been cured of their wild and frenzied cravings when sight can no longer minister to passion the images of pleasure. For when thus dissociated it must needs be treading on empty space since the stimulus of pleasure is no longer present.", |
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"[20] And further if he changes his abode he must shun great gatherings and welcome solitude. It cannot but be that even in the foreign soil there are many snares like those at home on which the shortsighted who delight in large assemblies are sure to be pinned. For a crowd is another name for everything that is disorderly, indecorous, discordant, culpable, and to be carried along with the crowd is very detrimental to the virtue of the settler on his first arrival.", |
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"[21] For just as when men are beginning to recover from a long illness their bodies easily give way because their increase of strength is not yet firmly established, so in those whose soul is now for the first time becoming healthy the sinews of the mind are flabby and rickety, so that there is a danger that passion, which is naturally stimulated by association with the thoughtless, may break out afresh." |
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[ |
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"[22] After the contest won by repentance come a third set of rewards offered for justice. He who attains to justice receives two prizes, one his salvation amid the general destruction, the other his appointment to take into his charge and protection the specimens of each kind of living creatures, mated in couples to produce a second creation to make good the annihilation of the first.", |
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"[23] For the Creator judged it right that the same man should end the condemned and begin the innocent generation, thereby teaching by deeds and not by words those who deny that the world is governed by providence, that, under the law which He established in universal nature, all the myriads of the human race, if they have lived a life of injustice, are not worth a single man who has not departed from justice. This person, in whose day the great deluge took place, is called by the Greeks Deucalion and by the Hebrews Noah.", |
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"[24] After this Trinity comes another Trinity holier and dearer to God, all belonging to one family. For it was a Father, a Son, a Grandson who pressed forward to the same goal of life, namely to be well pleasing to the Maker and Father of all. All that the multitudes admire, glory, wealth and pleasure, they despised, and laughed at vanity, that web woven of lies and cunningly devised to deceive the beholders.", |
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"[25] Vanity is the impostor who deifies lifeless objects, the great and formidable engine of aggression who with its scheming and trickery beguiles every city and loses no time in capturing the souls of the young. For it sets up its abode in them and remains there from earliest infancy to old age, save in the cases where God illumines them with a ray of truth—truth the antagonist of vanity who retreats before it though slowly and reluctantly vanquished by its superior power.", |
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"[26] This kind is few in number but in power so manifold and mighty that it cannot be contained by the whole compass of the earth but reaches to Heaven, possessed with an intense longing to contemplate and for ever be in the company of things divine. After investigating the whole realm of the visible to its very end, it straightway proceeds to the immaterial and conceptual, not availing itself of any of the senses but casting aside all the irrational part of the soul and employing only the part which is called mind and reasoning.", |
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"[27] The leader in adopting the godly creed, who first passed over from vanity to truth, came to his consummation by virtue gained through instruction, and he received for his reward belief in God. To him who happily gifted by nature has acquired the virtue which listens to no other than itself, learns from no other, is taught by no other, the prize awarded is joy. The man of practice who by unwearied and unswerving labour has made the excellent his own has for his crown the vision of God. Belief in God, life-long joy, the perpetual vision of the Existent—what can anyone conceive more profitable or more august than these?" |
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"[28] But let us look into each of them more carefully and not be led away by mere names but with a peering eye explore the inwardness of their full meaning. Now he who has sincerely believed in God has learned to disbelieve in all else, all that is created only to perish, beginning with the forces which so loudly assert themselves in him, reasoning and sense-perception. Each of these has assigned to it a council chamber and tribunal, where they conduct their inspections, one into the conceptual, the other into the visible, one with truth, the other with opinion for its goal.", |
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"[29] The instability and waywardness of opinion is obvious in that it is based on likelihoods and plausibilities, and every likeness by its deceptive resemblance falsifies the original. Reason, sense-perception’s master, who thinks itself appointed to judge things conceptual, which ever continue in the same stay, is found to be in sore trouble on many points. For when it comes to grapple with the vast number of particular subjects it becomes incapable, grows exhausted and collapses like an athlete flung prostrate by superior power.", |
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"[30] But he to whom it is given to gaze and soar beyond not only material but all immaterial things, and to take God for his sole stay and support with a reasonableness whose resolution falters not, and a faith unswerving and securely founded, will be a truly happy and thrice blessed man.", |
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"[31] After faith comes the reward set aside for the victorious champion who gained his virtue through nature and without a struggle. That reward is joy. For his name was in our speech “laughter” but as the Hebrews call it Isaac. Laughter is the outward and bodily sign of the unseen joy in the mind, and joy is in fact the best and noblest of the higher emotions.", |
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"[32] By it the soul is filled through and through with cheerfulness, rejoicing in the Father and Maker of all, rejoicing too in all His doings in which evil has no place, even though they do not conduce to its own pleasure, rejoicing because they are done for good and serve to preserve all that exists.", |
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"[33] A physician treating serious and dangerous diseases sometimes amputates parts of the body, hoping to secure the health of the rest, and the pilot in stormy weather casts cargo overboard to provide for the safety of the passengers. No blame attaches either to the physician for the mutilation or to the pilot for sacrifice of property, but on the contrary both are praised for looking to what is profitable rather than what is pleasant, and for having done the right thing.", |
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"[34] In the same way we must always reverence all-embracing nature and acquiesce cheerfully in its actions in the universe, free as they are from all intention of evil. For the question before us is not whether the events are pleasant to us personally but whether the chariot and ship of the universe is guided in safety like a well-ordered state.", |
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"[35] So he too is blessed no less than the first named. He never knows gloom and depression; his days are passed in happy freedom from fears and grief; the hardships and squalor of life never touch him even in his dreams, because every spot in his soul is already tenanted by joy." |
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"[36] After the self-taught, the man enriched by his natural gifts, the third to reach perfection is the Man of Practice who receives for his special reward the vision of God. For having been in touch with every side of human life and in no half-hearted familiarity with them all, and having shirked no toil or danger if thereby he might descry the truth, a quest well worthy of such love, he found mortal kind set in deep darkness spread over earth and water and the lower air and ether too. For ether and the whole Heaven wore to his eyes the semblance of night, since the whole realm of sense is without defining bounds, and the indefinite is close akin, even brother, to darkness.", |
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"[37] In his former years the eyes of his soul had been closed, but by means of continuous striving he began though slowly to open them and to break up and throw off the mist which overshadowed him. For a beam purer than ether and incorporeal suddenly shone upon him and revealed the conceptual world ruled by its charioteer.", |
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"[38] That charioteer, ringed as he was with beams of undiluted light, was beyond his sight or conjecture, for the eye was darkened by the dazzling beams. Yet in spite of the fiery stream which flooded it, his sight held its own in its unutterable longing to behold the vision.", |
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"[39] The Father and Saviour perceiving the sincerity of his yearning in pity gave power to the penetration of his eyesight and did not grudge to grant him the vision of Himself in so far as it was possible for mortal and created nature to contain it. Yet the vision only showed that He IS, not what He is.", |
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"[40] For this which is better than the good, more venerable than the monad, purer than the unit, cannot be discerned by anyone else; to God alone is it permitted to apprehend God." |
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"Now the fact that He IS, which can be apprehended under the name of His subsistence, is not apprehended by all or at any rate not in the best way. Some distinctly deny that there is such a thing as the Godhead. Others hesitate and fluctuate as though unable to state whether there is or not. Others whose notions about the subsistence of God are derived through habit rather than thinking from those who brought them up, believe themselves to have successfully attained to religion yet have left on it the imprint of superstition.", |
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"[41] Others again who have had the strength through knowledge to envisage the Maker and Ruler of all have in the common phrase advanced from down to up. Entering the world as into a well-ordered city they have beheld the earth standing fast, highland and lowland full of sown crops and trees and fruits and all kinds of living creatures to boot; also spread over its surface, seas and lakes and rivers both spring fed and winter torrents. They have seen too the air and breezes so happily tempered, the yearly seasons changing in harmonious order, and over all the sun and moon, planets and fixed stars, the whole heaven and heaven’s host, line upon line, a true universe in itself revolving within the universe.", |
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"[42] Struck with admiration and astonishment they arrived at a conception according with what they beheld, that surely all these beauties and this transcendent order has not come into being automatically but by the handiwork of an architect and world maker; also that there must be a providence, for it is a law of nature that a maker should take care of what has been made.", |
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"[43] These no doubt are truly admirable persons and superior to the other classes. They have as I said advanced from down to up by a sort of heavenly ladder and by reason and reflection happily inferred the Creator from His works. But those, if such there be, who have had the power to apprehend Him through Himself without the co-operation of any reasoning process to lead them to the sight, must be recorded as holy and genuine worshippers and friends of God in very truth.", |
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"[44] In their company is he who in the Hebrew is called Israel but in our tongue the God-seer who sees not His real nature, for that, as I said, is impossible—but that He IS. And this knowledge he has gained not from any other source, not from things on earth or things in Heaven, not from the elements or combinations of elements mortal or immortal, but at the summons of Him alone who has willed to reveal His existence as a person to the suppliant.", |
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"[45] How this access has been obtained may be well seen through an illustration. Do we behold the sun which sense perceives by any other thing than the sun, or the stars by any others than the stars, and in general is not light seen by light? In the same way God too is His own brightness and is discerned through Himself alone, without anything co-operating or being able to co-operate in giving a perfect apprehension of His existence.", |
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"[46] They then do but make a happy guess, who are at pains to discern the Uncreated, and Creator of all from His creation, and are on the same footing as those who try to trace the nature of the monad from the dyad, whereas observation of the dyad should begin with the monad which is the starting-point. The seekers for truth are those who envisage God through God, light through light." |
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"[47] So much for his chief reward. But besides all this the Practiser receives a prize with an ill-sounding name but excellent when we consider its meaning. This prize is symbolically called the “numbing of the broad part.” By the “broad part” arrogance and pride are suggested, since the soul spreads itself inordinately in the wrong direction; by “numbing,” the contraction of the conceit which lifts itself on high and puffs itself out.", |
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"[48] And nothing is so profitable as that the laxity and free play of the appetites should be hampered and numbed with their vitalizing forces paralysed so that the inordinate strength of the passions may be exhausted and thus provide a breadth in which the better part of the soul may expand.", |
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"[49] A further question for consideration is the special suitability of the reward assigned to each of the three. Faith for him who was perfected through teaching, since the learner must believe the instructions of his teacher: to educate a disbeliever is difficult or rather impossible.", |
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"[50] Joy for him who through the happiness of his natural endowments arrives at virtue. For good abilities and natural gifts are a matter for rejoicing. The mind exults in the facility of its apprehension and the felicity of the processes by which it discovers what it seeks without labour, as though dictated by an inward prompter. For to find the solution of difficulties quickly must bring joy.", |
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"[51] Vision for him who attains wisdom through practice. For after the active life of youth the contemplative life of old age is the best and most sacred—, that life which God sends to the stern like a helmsman and entrusts the rudder into its hands as well fitted to steer the course of earthly things. For without contemplation and the knowledge which it gives no activity attains excellence." |
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"[52] One other man I will mention and then, as I wish to avoid prolixity, proceed to the next part of the subject. This man is he who in the sacred contests one after the other was proclaimed the winner of the crown. By sacred contests I do not mean those which men regard as such; they are unholy since they offer instead of the utmost penalties honours and crowns to violence, outrage and injustice. I mean those which the soul has to fight out, wielding successfully wisdom against folly and knavery, moderation against profligacy and miserliness, courage against rashness and cowardice, and the other virtues against the opposite vices which are at variance with one another and with other vices too.", |
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"[53] Now all the virtues are virgins, but the fairest among them all, the acknowledged queen of the dance, is piety, which Moses, the teacher of divine lore, in a special degree had for his own, and through it gained among a multitude of other gifts, which have been described in the treatises dealing with his life, four special rewards, the offices of king, legislator, prophet and high priest.", |
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"[54] For he did not become king in the ordinary way by the aid of troops and weapons or of the might of ships and infantry and cavalry. It was God who appointed him by the free judgement of his subjects, God who created in them the willingness to choose him as their sovereign. Of him alone we read that without the gifts of speech or possessions or money he was made a king, he who eschewed the blind wealth and embraced that which has eyes to see, and, as we may say without reserve, held that all he owned was to have God for his heritage.", |
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"[55] This same person was also a lawgiver. For a king must enjoin and forbid and a law is nothing else but a pronouncement enjoining what ought to be done and forbidding what ought not. But in both cases there is uncertainty as to what is profitable, since through ignorance we often enjoin what should not be done and forbid what should be done, and therefore it was meet that he should receive a third gift of prophecy to keep his feet from stumbling. For the prophet is the interpreter of God who prompts from within what he should say, and with God nothing is in fault.", |
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"[56] Meet also that he should have the fourth office of chief priesthood to enable him armed with prophetic knowledge to worship the Self-existent, and offer up thanksgivings for his subjects when they do well and prayers and supplications for propitiation when they do amiss. All these are one in kind; they should co-exist united with bonds of harmony and be found embodied in the same person, since he who falls short in any of the four is imperfectly equipped for government and the administration of public affairs which he has undertaken will limp and halt." |
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"[57] This may suffice for the rewards set before individual men, but houses and families of many members have theirs also. For instance the twelve tribes into which the nation was divided had the same number of chieftains connected not only by membership of the same house and family but by a still more real affinity, for they were brothers with the same father, and their grandfather and great-grandfather as well as their father were the founders of the nation.", |
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"[58] The first of these who passed from vanity to truth, who spurned the impostures of Chaldean astrology for the sake of the fuller spectacle which he beheld and followed the vision, drawn to it as iron is said to be drawn by the magnet, thus changed by instruction from sophist to sage, had many children, but all faulty save one to whom he bound fast the cables of the race and there found a safe haven.", |
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"[59] That son again endued with a nature which learned from no other teacher than itself had two sons. One was wild and indocile, brimful of fierce temper and lust, who to sum him up armed the unreasoning part of the soul to war against the rational. The other was gentle and kindly, a lover of noble conduct, of equality and simplicity, a soldier of the better cause, the champion of reason and antagonist of folly.", |
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"[60] This is the third of the founders, father of many children and alone among the three blessed in them all, who met with no mishap in any part of his household, like a happy husbandman who sees his whole crop safe and sound, thriving under his hand and bearing fruit." |
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"[61] In each of the three the literal story is symbolical of a hidden meaning which demands examination. Thus everyone who is taught, when he passes over to knowledge, must abandon ignorance. Ignorance is multiform and therefore it is said of the first of the three that he was the father of many children but did not deem any of them worthy to be called his sons save one. For the learner may also be said to disown the offspring of ignorance and discard them, seeing their hostility and ill will.", |
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"[62] Again naturally all we men, before the reason in us is fully grown, lie in the borderline between vice and virtue with no bias to either side. But when the mind is fully fledged when it has seen and absorbed into every part of its vitality the vision of the good, it ranges freely and wings its way to reach that vision and leaves behind good’s brother and birth-fellow evil, which also flies away straight on in the opposite direction.", |
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"[63] This is what underlies his saying that the possessor of a highly gifted nature was the father of twins. For the soul of every man from the first as soon as he is born bears in its womb the twins good and evil as I have said and has the vision of both before him, but, when it comes to have happiness and bliss for its lot, it inclines uniformly to the god, never swaying in the other direction nor oscillating into equilibrium between the two.", |
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"[64] Once more if the soul has received a good nature, good instruction and thirdly therewith exercise in the principles of virtue, none of them fluid and superficial, but all cemented within it, firmly impressed and strung as it were into a unity, it wins health, wins power, and to these are added the fine hue of modesty and a robust and comely form.", |
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"[65] This soul through the triple excellence of nature, learning and practice becomes the plenitude of virtues, leaving no empty room within itself where other things can enter, and it engenders sons twice six in number, the perfect number, the copy and likeness of the zodiac cycle, a source of increased welfare to things here below. This is the household, which kept safe from harm, perfect and united both in the literal history and in the allegorical interpretation, received for its reward, as I have said, the chieftaincy of the tribes of the nation.", |
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"[66] From this household, increased in the course of time to a great multitude, were founded flourishing and orderly cities, schools of wisdom, justice and religion, where also the rest of virtue and how to acquire it is the sublime subject of their research." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[67] We have discussed typical examples of the rewards assigned in the past to the good both individually and in common with others, from which anyone can easily discern those which have been left unnoticed. We have next to consider in their turn the punishments appointed for the wicked, but in a general way since this is not the time to describe particular cases.", |
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"[68] At the very beginning when the human race had not yet multiplied arose a fratricide. He it was who first fell under a curse, who first brought the monstrous pollution of human blood upon the still pure earth, who first, when it was giving birth and growth to every kind of animals and plants and was bright with all the products of its fruitfulness, set a bar to that fruitfulness, who first armed dissolution against generation, death against life, sorrow against joy and evil against good.", |
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"[69] What then could be done to him by which he would pay the penalty he deserved, he who in a single action included everything that is violent and impious? Slay him, perhaps you will say. That is a man’s idea—man who has no eyes for the great court of justice,—for men think that death is the termination of punishment but in the divine court it is hardly the beginning.", |
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"[70] Since then the deed was without precedent, the punishment devised had to be also without precedent. What is this punishment? That he should live for ever in a state of dying and so to speak suffer a death which is deathless and unending. For there are two kinds of death, one consists in being dead, which is something either good or indifferent, the other consists in dying and that is entirely bad, more painful because more durable.", |
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"[71] Death thus remains with him perpetually; observe how that is effected. There are four passions in the soul, two concerned with the good, either at the time or in the future, that is pleasure and desire, and two concerned with evil present or expected, that is grief and fear. The pair on the good side God tore out of him by the roots so that never by any chance he should have any pleasant sensations or desire anything pleasant, and engrafted in him only the pair on the bad side, producing grief unmixed with cheerfulness and fear unrelieved.", |
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"[72] For he says that he laid a curse upon the fratricide that he should ever “groan and tremble.” And he set a sign upon him that no man should slay him so that he should not die once but continue perpetually dying, as I have said, dying with anguish and distress and sufferings unceasing, and most grievous of all should be sensible of his own evil plight, feeling the weight of the present ills and foreseeing the onrush of those yet to come against which he could not guard. For hope had been torn from him, hope which God has sown in mankind that they should have a comforter to be part of their nature and give relief to the distress of all whose deeds are not beyond atonement.", |
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"[73] So as a man carried away by a torrent dreads the stream around him in which he is swept along but dreads still more the onrush of the flood from above propelling him violently and ceaselessly, but also towering high over him and threatening to engulf him, so too the ills close at hand are painful but more grievous are those which flow from fear, fear which supplies abundance of sorrows as from a fountain." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[74] Such are the penalties decreed against the man who first committed fratricide, but there are others decreed against groups who conspire to sin in common. There were certain temple attendants, servitors of the sanctuary, appointed to the office of gate-keepers. These persons filled with insensate ambition rose against the priests whose privileges they claimed should belong to themselves.", |
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"[75] They adopted as leader of the sedition the senior from among them, who also with a few fellow madmen had been the instigator of the presumptuous enterprise, and leaving the frontage and the outermost parts of the building proceeded towards the inmost sanctuary intending to displace those to whom divine utterances had adjudged the priesthood.", |
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"[76] Naturally enough the whole multitude was greatly disturbed. They felt that their fundamental institutions were being shaken, their laws violated, and the decent order of the holy place reduced to chaos by such alarming anarchy.", |
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"[77] All this roused the indignation of the guardian and ruler of the nation. At first very seriously, but without loss of temper, which indeed was alien to his nature, he endeavoured with words of admonition to bring them to a better mind and to refrain from transgressing the appointed limits or revolting against the sacred and hallowed institutions on which the hopes of the nation depended.", |
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"[78] But this he found was of no avail. They were deaf to all his words, believing that in appointing his brother high priest and committing the priesthood to his nephews he had given way to family affection. He was not however greatly aggrieved at this, great grievance though it was. What he felt to be intolerable was that they should purpose to set at nought the divine instructions under which the choice of the priests had been made.…" |
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], |
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[ |
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"[79] … A clear testimony is recorded in the Holy Scriptures. We will cite first the invocations which he is accustomed to call benedictions. If, he says, you keep the divine commandment in obedience to his ordinances and accept his precepts, not merely to hear them but to carry them out by your life and conduct, the first boon you will have is victory over your enemies.", |
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"[80] For the commandments are not too huge and heavy for the strength of those to whom they will apply, nor is the good far away either beyond the sea or at the end of the earth, so that it requires of you a lingering and wearisome exile, nor has it suddenly left this earth to settle in Heaven, so that one can scarce reach them though he soar on high and wing his way thither. No, it is close by, very near, firmly set in three of the parts of which each of us is constituted, mouth and heart and hand, representing in a figure respectively speech and thought and action.", |
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"[81] For if our words correspond with our thoughts and intentions and our actions with our words and the three mutually follow each other, bound together with indissoluble bonds of harmony, happiness prevails and happiness is wisdom pure of all falsehood, the higher and the lower wisdom, the higher for the worship of God, the lower for the regulation of human life.", |
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"[82] Now while the commandments of the laws are only on our lips our acceptance of them is little or none, but when we add thereto deeds which follow in their company, deeds shown in the whole conduct of our lives, the commandments will be as it were brought up out of the deep darkness into the light and surrounded with the brightness of good fame and good report.", |
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"[83] For who, however spiteful his nature, would not admit that surely that nation alone is wise and full of knowledge whose history has been such that it has not left the divine exhortations voided and forsaken by the actions which are akin to them, but has fulfilled the words with laudable deeds?", |
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"[84] Such a race has its dwelling not far from God; it has the vision of etherial loveliness always before its eyes, and its steps are guided by a heavenward yearning. So that if one should ask “what manner of nation is great?”, others might aptly answer “a nation which has God to listen to its prayers inspired by true religion and to draw nigh when they call upon him with a clean conscience.”" |
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], |
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[ |
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"[85] Enmity is of two kinds. There is the enmity of men which has selfishness for its motive and is deliberately practised, and there is the enmity of wild beasts which is actuated by natural antipathy without such deliberation. Consequently each must be treated separately, taking first that of our natural foes, the beasts, whose hatred is directed not towards a single city or nation but to mankind as a whole and endures not for a limited period but is age-long, without bound or limit of time.", |
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"[86] Some of these fear man as their master and cringe before him yet retain a rancorous hatred, others are audacious and more venturesome and are the first to attack, lying in wait to seize their opportunity if they are weaker, openly if they are stronger.", |
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"[87] For this is the one war where no quarter or truce is possible; as wolves with lambs, so all wild beasts both on land and water are at war with all men. This war no mortal can quell; that is done only by the Uncreated, when He judges that there are some worthy of salvation, men of peaceful disposition who cherish brotherly affection and good fellowship, in whom envy has either found no room at all or has entered only to take its departure with all speed, because their will is to bring their private blessings into the common stock to be shared and enjoyed by all alike.", |
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"[88] Would that this good gift might shine upon our life and that we might be able to see that day when savage creatures become tame and gentle. But a very necessary preliminary to this is that the wild beasts within the soul shall be tamed, and no greater boon than this can be found. For is it not foolish to suppose that we shall escape the mischief which the brutes outside us can do if we are always working up those within us to dire savagery? Therefore we need not give up hope that when the wild beasts within us are fully tamed the animals too will become tame and gentle.", |
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"[89] When that time comes I believe that bears and lions and panthers and the Indian animals, elephants and tigers, and all others whose vigour and power are invincible, will change their life of solitariness and isolation for one of companionship, and gradually in imitation of the gregarious creatures show themselves tame when brought face to face with mankind. They will no longer as heretofore be roused to ferocity by the sight, but will be awe-struck into respectful fear of him as their natural lord and master, while others will grow gentle in emulation of the docility and affection for the master shown for instance by the little Maltese dogs, who express their fondness with the tails which they so cheerily wag.", |
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"[90] Then too the tribes of scorpions and serpents and the other reptiles will have no use for their venom. The Egyptian river too carries man-eating creatures called crocodiles and hippopotamuses in close proximity to the inhabitants of the country, so too the seas have their multitudinous species of very formidable animals. Among all these the man of worth will move sacrosanct and inviolate because God has respected virtue and given it the privilege that none should imagine mischief against it." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[91] Thus the age-long and natural and therefore primary war will be brought to an end through the change which makes the wild beasts tame and amenable. And then its later successor whose source is selfishness and its method deliberate will be easily settled, because men, I believe, will take shame to think that they should prove to be more savage than the irrational animals, when they have escaped all danger of injury or mischief from them.", |
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"[92] For surely it will seem a deep disgrace that while venomous and man-eating brutes and creatures without a sense of fellowship or companionship have become placable and have been won over to a peaceful disposition, man, a creature naturally gentle and kindly, in whom the sense of fellowship and amity is ingrained, should implacably seek the life of his own kind.", |
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"[93] Either, then, as he says, the war will not pass through the land of the godly at all, but will dissolve and fall to pieces of itself when the enemy perceives the nature of their opponents, that they have in justice an irresistible ally. For virtue is majestic and august and can unaided and silently allay the onsets of evils however great.", |
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"[94] Or if some fanatics whose lust for war defies restraint or remonstrance come careering to attack, till they are actually engaged, they will be full of arrogance and bluster, but when they have come to a trial of blows they will find that their talk has been an idle boast. Win they cannot. Forced back by your superior strength, they will fly headlong, companies of hundreds before handfuls of five, ten thousands before hundreds by many ways for the one by which they came.", |
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"[95] Some, without even any pursuer save fear, will turn their backs and present admirable targets to their enemies so that it would be an easy matter for all to fall slaughtered to a man. For “there shall come forth a man,” says the oracle, and leading his host to war he will subdue great and populous nations, because God has sent to his aid the reinforcement which befits the godly, and that is dauntless courage of soul and all-powerful strength of body, either of which strikes fear into the enemy and the two if united are quite irresistible.", |
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"[96] Some of the enemy, he says, will be unworthy to be defeated by men. He promises to marshal against them to their shame and perdition, swarms of wasps to fight in the van of the godly,", |
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"[97] who will win not only a permanent and bloodless victory in the war but also a sovereignty which none can contest, bringing to its subjects the benefit which will accrue from the affection or fear or respect which they feel. For the conduct of their rulers shows three high qualities which contribute to make a government secure from subversion, namely dignity, strictness, benevolence, which produce the feelings mentioned above. For respect is created by dignity, fear by strictness, affection by benevolence, and these when blended harmoniously in the soul render subjects obedient to their rulers." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[98] These are the first blessings which he tells us will fall to the lot of those who follow God and always and everywhere cleave to His commandments and so fasten them to every part of life that no part can go astray into new and unwholesome ways. The second blessing is wealth which necessarily follows peace and settled authority.", |
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"[99] Now the simple wealth of nature is food and shelter. Its food is bread and the spring water which gushes up in every part of the inhabited world. Shelter is of two kinds, raiment and housing, to save us from the injuries which cold and heat bring in their train, and both of these, if anyone is willing to eliminate costly and superfluous extravagance,", |
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"[100] are very easily obtainable. Yet those who pursue the above-named wealth, who welcome the gifts of nature and not those of empty seeming, who practise frugality and self-restraint, will possess also abundance and more than abundance of another wealth in the shape of delectable food, and that without effort on their part. For it will spring to meet them as best fitted to receive it and as men of serious purpose who will know how to use it aright, and it will gladly flee from association with men of profligacy and violence, lest it should minister its boons to those who live to harm their neighbours and pass by those who serve the common weal.", |
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"[101] For there is a divine promise that on those who keep the sacred ordinances Heaven will shower timely rains, and the earth will bear abundance of every kind of food, the lowlands of sown grain, the highlands of tree fruits, and no season will be left without some measure of beneficence, but so continuous will be the succession of the gifts of God “that the reaping will overtake the vintage and the vintage the seed time.”", |
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"[102] Thus in ceaseless and unbroken order they will gather in the former harvest and hope for the latter, one set waiting to follow another, so that the beginnings of the later may join on to the ends of the earlier and move round and round in a procession from which no good thing is withheld.", |
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"[103] For the multitude of things produced will suffice both for immediate use and enjoyment and to provide a generous surplus for the future, as the new crops ripen over the old and fill up what is lacking in them. Sometimes so vast will be the fertility that no one will take any thought for the harvest that is past but will leave it unhusbanded and unhoarded for all who wish to use it without fear or scruple.", |
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"[104] For those who possess stored up in Heaven the true wealth whose adornment is wisdom and godliness have also wealth of earthly riches in abundance. For under the providence and good care of God their store-houses are ever filled, because the impulses of their minds and the undertakings of their hands are never hindered in carrying out successfully the purposes which they ever zealously pursue.", |
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"[105] But those who through injustice and impiety have no heavenly portion cannot prosper in acquiring earthly goods either, and if any such acquisition comes their way it speedily springs away as if its coming at all were not to benefit its possessor but to make the distress which necessarily follows on lack of means weigh more heavily upon him." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[106] In those days he says your vast prosperity and opulence will cause you to do to others what you now suffer from them. Now because you pay no respect to the laws or ancestral customs, but despise the whole body of them, you lack bare necessities and wait upon the houses of money lenders and usurers and borrow at high interest.", |
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"[107] But then, as I said, you will do the opposite, for in the abundance of your opulence you will yourself lend to others, not few loans nor to few, but many and to many, nay rather to whole nations. For prosperity will attend you in everything both in the city and in the country; in the city by offices, honours and reputations through justice well administered, through policy well considered, through words and deeds directed to serve the common weal: in the land by the fertility both of the necessaries, corn, wine and oil, and the means of enjoyable life, that is the numberless kinds of tree fruits, and also by the fruitful multiplying of oxen and goats and other cattle.", |
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"[108] But someone may say, what profit is there in all this to one who is not going to leave behind him heirs and successors? And therefore he crowns his boons by saying that no man shall be childless and no. woman barren, but all the true servants of God will fulfil the law of nature for the procreation of children.", |
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"[109] For men will be fathers and women mothers both happy in those they beget or bear, so that each family will be a plenitude with a long list of kinsfolk, with no part nor any of the names which signify relationship missing. In the upper line will be parents, uncles, grandparents, likewise in the lower line sons, brothers, brothers’ sons, grandsons, daughters’ sons, cousins, cousins’ sons, in fact all that are allied by blood.", |
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"[110] And none of those who conform to the laws will die an early death or be cut short, or denied any stage of life that God has assigned to the human race, but each will rise as by stepping-stones from infancy through the successive terms appointed to every age, fulfilling its allotted tale until he reaches the last, the neighbour of death or rather immortality, and passes from that truly goodly old age to leave a great house of goodly children to fill his place." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[111] This is what he means when he gives the prediction “thou shalt fulfil the number of thy days” and the exactness and aptness of the words which he uses is truly admirable. For the ignorant and lawless is of no account, as they say, and has no number, but he who can lay claim to instruction and holy laws has for his first boon that he is seen to be of high account and well approved and therefore gains a number and a place in an ordered line.", |
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"[112] Marvellously apt too is the phrase that the fulfilment is not of months or years but of days, signifying that every day of the man of worth must leave nothing void or empty where sin can come in, but have every part and space in it filled up with virtuous and excellent living, for virtue and excellence are judged not by quantity but by quality. Therefore he held that the wise man’s single day rightly spent is worth a whole life-time.", |
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"[113] This is what he suggests in another place where he says that such a man will be worthy of blessing both in his goings out and in his comings in, because in all his ways, moving or standing, the good man shows his merit both inside and outside, both as householder and as statesman, his household skill shown in right management within, his statesmanship in outside reforms as the welfare of the state requires.", |
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"[114] So then one such man in a city, if such be found, will be superior to the city, one such city to the country around, one such nation will stand above other nations, as the head above the body, to be conspicuous on every side, not for its own glory but rather for the benefit of the beholders. For to gaze continuously upon noble models imprints their likeness in souls which are not entirely hardened and stony.", |
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"[115] And therefore those who would imitate these examples of good living so marvellous in their loveliness, are bidden not to despair of changing for the better or of a restoration to the land of wisdom and virtue from the spiritual dispersion which vice has wrought.", |
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"[116] For when God is gracious He makes all things light and easy, and He does become gracious to those who depart with shame from incontinence to self-restraint and deplore the deeds of their guilty past, abhor the base illusive images which they imprinted on their souls and first earnestly strive to still the storm of the passions, then seek to lead a life of serenity and peace.", |
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"[117] So then just as God with a single call may easily gather together from the ends of the earth to any place that He wills the exiles dwelling in the utmost parts of the earth, so too the mind which has strayed everywhere in prolonged vagrancy, maltreated by pleasure and lust, the mistresses it honoured so unduly, may well be brought back by the mercy of its Saviour from the pathless wild into a road wherein it is resolved to flee straight on, a flight not the discredited flight of the outcast, but a flight of one banished from evil to salvation, a banishment which may be truly held to be better than a recall." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[118] So much for the external blessings promised, victories over enemies, successes in wars, establishments of peace and abundant supplies of the good things of peace, honours and offices and the eulogies accompanying the successful, who receive praise from the lips of all, friends and enemies, praises prompted by goodwill in the one case and by fear in the other. But we must also speak of a more personal matter, the blessings bestowed on the body.", |
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"[119] He promises that those who take pains to cultivate virtue and set the holy laws before them to guide them in all they do or say in their private or in their public capacity will receive as well the gift of complete freedom from disease, and if some infirmity should befall them it will come not to do them injury but to remind the mortal that he is mortal, to humble his over-weening spirit and to improve his moral condition. Health will be followed by efficiency of the senses and the perfection and completeness of every part, so that without impediment they may render each the services for which it was made.", |
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"[120] For God thought it meet to grant as a privilege to the man of worth that his body, the congenital house of the soul, should be a house well built and well compacted from foundation to roof, to provide the many things which are necessary or useful for life and particularly for the sake of the mind of which we are speaking, a mind purged clean of every spot.", |
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"[121] This mind, the initiate of the holy mysteries, the fellow traveller of the heavenly bodies as they revolve in ordered march, has been honoured with the gift of quietude by God, who willed that it should be undistracted, never affected by any of the troublesome sensations which the distresses of the body engender, subjecting it to a domination unduly usurped by such sensations. For if anything over-chills or over-heats it, the house becomes warped and dried up or contrariwise wet and damp, and all these make the mind incapable of guiding the course of its own life aright.", |
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"[122] But if it resides in a healthy body it will have full ease to live there devoting its leisure to the lore of wisdom, thus gaining a blessed and happy life. This mind it is that drinks deep of the strong wine of God’s beneficent power and feasts on holy thoughts and doctrines.", |
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"[123] This it is in which God, so says the prophet, “walks” as in a palace, for in truth the wise man’s mind is a palace and house of God. This it is which is declared to possess personally the God who is the God of all, this again is the chosen people, the people not of particular rulers, but of the one and only true ruler, a people holy even as He is holy.", |
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"[124] This it is which but now lay under the yoke of many pleasures and many lusts and the innumerable distresses which its vices and lusts entail, but has been redeemed into freedom by God, who broke asunder the miseries of its slavery. This it is which received a benefaction not named with bated breath but noised abroad and proclaimed on every side because of the mightiness of its champion, whereby it was not dragged down tailwards but lifted up to the head.", |
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"[125] These last words contain an allegory and are figuratively expressed. For as in an animal the head is the first and best part and the tail the last and meanest, and in fact not a part which helps to complete the list of members, but a means of swishing off the winged creatures which settle on it, so too he means that the virtuous one, whether single man or people, will be the head of the human race and all the others like the limbs of a body which draw their life from the forces in the head and at the top.", |
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"[126] These are the blessings invoked upon good men, men who fulfil the laws by their deeds, which blessings will be accomplished by the gift of the bounteous God, who glorifies and rewards moral excellence because of its likeness to Himself. We must now investigate the curses delivered against the law-breakers and transgressors.", |
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"On Curses" |
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], |
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[ |
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"[127] The first curse which he describes as the lightest of their evils is poverty and dearth and lack of necessaries and conditions of absolute destitution. The crops, he says, will be ravaged while unripe, or reaped when ripe by the sudden attacks of the hostile army, and thus will bring about a double misfortune, starvation for friends and abundance for enemies. For the good fortune of the foe is more or at any rate no less painful than our own suffering.", |
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"[128] And even if the enemy take no action the more grievous injuries which nature inflicts will not be inactive. You put seed in the deep soil of the lowlands, and a cloud of locusts will suddenly fly down and reap the harvest, leaving only an insignificant fraction of what you sowed for you to gather. You plant a vineyard, spare no expense and endure the endless hardships which the husbandman has to expect, and, when it is come to its fullness and is flourishing, laden with a plentiful crop, worms will come and strip the grapes.", |
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"[129] When you see your olive yards thriving with an abundant wealth of fruit you will naturally be pleased at the prospect of a fortunate ingathering, but when you come to pick them you will be faced with misfortune, better called the punishment of impiety. For the oil and all the fatness will run out unnoticed, and the outer lump will be left by itself as empty of all goodness as the soul which it remains to disappoint. In fact all the crops which you sow or the trees which you plant will be mildewed and perish with their fruits." |
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"[130] But besides these there are other sufferings waiting their turn to create want and destitution. The sources which nature uses to bestow her boons on mankind, earth and heaven, will become barren. Earth will destroy her fruit in the germ and prove unable to bring them to their fullness. Heaven will be transformed into sterility, as none of the yearly seasons, neither winter nor summer, nor spring nor autumn arise to take their proper places but all are forcibly merged in formless turbid congeries by the dictation of an imperious power.", |
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"[131] For no downpour, no shower, no slight drizzle nor tiny dropping, no dew nor anything else that can promote growth will come. But on the contrary all that makes havoc of growing plants or destroys the ripened fruit will be provided to hinder them from coming to their perfection. For He says “I will make the heaven brazen to you and the earth iron,” indicating that both of them will fail to perform their proper functions for which they were made.", |
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"[132] For when did ever iron bear corn in the ear or brass bring rain, things necessary to all living creatures and particularly to men, whose life is precarious and full of needs? And the phrase suggests not only unfruitfulness and the ruin of the yearly seasons but also the sources of war and the intolerable and innumerable evils which war creates, for brass and iron are the materials from which the weapons of war are made.", |
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"[133] Earth too will bear dust, and powder will descend from Heaven above, bringing a very grievous cloud of smoke to choke and destroy life, and so no instrument of extinction will be left unused. Whole families will waste away from many into nothingness, cities will be suddenly left stripped of inhabitants, monuments of their past prosperity and the misery that swiftly followed, left to admonish those who can learn their lesson of wisdom." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[134] So greatly will the lack of necessaries prevail that dismissing all thought of them they will betake themselves to feeding on their own kind, not only on strangers outside their family but on their nearest and dearest. The father will lay his hands on the flesh of his son, the mother on the entrails of her daughter, brothers on brothers, children on parents, and always the weaker will supply an evil and accursed meal to the stronger. The story of Thyestes will be child’s play compared with the monstrous calamities which those times of terror will bring about.", |
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"[135] For apart from all else, just as the prosperous desire life to enjoy their blessings, so too these wretches will have firmly implanted in them a great longing for survival to experience miseries measureless and ceaseless all beyond hope of cure. For it would be a comparatively small matter in their desperation to cut short their afflictions by death, a course often taken by those who have a little sanity left. But these sufferers in their infatuation will wish to prolong their life to the utmost, and their appetite for supreme misery is never satisfied.", |
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"[136] Such are the natural consequences of what appears to be the lightest of the calamities promised, destitution, when it comes as a visitation of divine justice. For cold and thirst and want of food are hard to bear but may on occasions be most earnestly desired, if we feel that they will only entail undelayed annihilation, but when they linger and waste both soul and body they are bound to produce marvels of suffering worse even than those which, doubtless because they are so intensely painful, are represented on the tragic stage." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[137] Slavery to the free is a thing most intolerable. To avoid it sensible people are eager and ready to die and gladly run any risk in contending with those who menace them with enslavement. But an irresistible enemy is also something intolerable, and when both despotic power and hostility are combined in the same person, who can resist one to whom his authority has given the power to act unjustly and his implacable enmity the disposition to show no consideration?", |
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"[138] So he declares that those who set at nought the holy laws will have for their masters enemies who do not shrink from ruthlessness. And not only will they be brought into subjection by the aggressiveness of the enemy but will voluntarily and deliberately surrender themselves because of the distresses which hunger and lack of necessaries produce. For, in the opinion of some, lesser evils may be accepted to escape from the greater, though indeed is any of those here mentioned small?", |
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"[139] For in slavery their bodies will be exercised in doing service to cruel orders and still more cruel will be the distressing sights which will torture their souls and drive them to despair. They will see what they have built or planted or acquired become the heritage of enemies who enjoy the good things which others have owned and made ready. They will see them feasting on the fattest of their own cattle, slaughtered and dressed to give high delight and enjoyment to the robbers before the eyes of the robbed. They will see too the women whom they took in lawful wedlock for the procreation of true-born children, chaste domestic loving wives, outraged as though they were harlots.", |
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"[140] They will set about to defend them but apart from some struggling will be able to accomplish nothing, with their strength all gelded and their nerves unstrung. For they will present targets to all who wish to ravish, harry, rob, assault, wound and deal out injuries, outrage and destruction. No shaft will fall lame or impotent; a true eye and hand will carry them all to their mark.", |
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"[141] Cursed will they be in their cities and villages, cursed in their houses and farm buildings. Cursed will be the field and all the seed dropped therein, cursed the fertile parts of the uplands and every kind of cultivated tree. Cursed their herds of cattle, barren without hope of increase, cursed all their fruits, blasted at the very height of their ripening.", |
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"[142] Their store-houses full of provisions and money will become empty; no profit-seeking trade will flourish; all the crafts, the many-sided industries, the million ways of earning a livelihood, will prove useless to those who pursue them. Their hopes of attaining their ambition and in general everything which they take in hand will be frustrated by the evil practices or actions which their abandonment of God’s service heads and consummates. For these are the wages of impiety and disobedience." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[143] Besides all this diseases of the body will overpower and devour each separate limb and part, as well as tearing the whole frame right through with hot fits, cold fits, wasting consumption, malignant scabs, jaundice, mortification of the eyes, ulcers suppurating and creeping till they spread over the whole skin, dysentery, disorders of the intestine, obstruction of the passages in the lungs so that the respiration cannot travel properly. If the tongue is crippled or the ears lose their hearing, or the eyes their sight, or the other senses are dulled or disorganized, we have conditions which though terrible in themselves lose their terrors if compared with these graver symptoms,", |
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"[144] when the blood in the veins has lost its life-giving power and the breath in the bronchia can no longer receive a salutary fusion from its natural partner the air outside, and the nerves are relaxed and unstrung.", |
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"[145] These are followed by a breaking up of the harmony and concord which unites the members. They have already laboured under the stream of the bitter briny rheumatic humour which steals within them, and when it is enclosed in narrow passages through which it has no easy outlet, undergoes and in its turn exerts a heavy pressure, producing bitter and almost intolerable pains. This again engenders affections of the feet and joints and distempers for which no curative remedy is known, nor can human ingenuity find any way of healing them.", |
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"[146] Such sights will make people ask in amazement how it is that persons who but now were plump and well clothed with flesh in the full bloom of robust health have so suddenly wasted away and shrunk into nothing but a set of sinews with a thin coating of skin; and how women who have lived in ease and comfort, the dainty product of the luxury that has grown up with them from their earliest years, have become wizened in body as well as in soul through the cruel ravages of disease.", |
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"[147] Then too the enemy will pursue and the sword will exact justice. They will fly to their cities and think that they have found safety, but a false hope has deceived them; the enemy will be there already lying in wait, and they will perish wholesale." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[148] And if with all this they fail to learn wisdom and still go crookedly away from the straight paths which lead to truth, cowardice and fear will be established in their souls. They will fly when no man pursues; rumours false as they so often are will send them falling headlong, and the lightest sound of a leaf borne through the air will cause as much trepidation and quaking as the most savage war waged by mightier enemies. So children will take no thought for parents nor parents for children, nor brother for brother, expecting that mutual help will lead to destruction, and flight, each man for himself, to salvation.", |
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"[149] But the hopes of the wicked are not fulfilled; those who imagine they have escaped will suffer worse or at any rate no better fate than those who were captured earlier. Further if some elude their captors they will have to meet a reserve force of their natural enemies. These are wild beasts more ferocious than men, formidably equipped with their native weapons, whom God when He first made the universe created to put fear into those who could take the warning and to punish inexorably the incorrigible.", |
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"[150] Those who behold the cities with their very foundations demolished will disbelieve that they were ever before inhabited, and all the calamities, whether described in the law or not, which suddenly succeeded the bright days of prosperity, will become to them like a proverb.", |
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"[151] The wasting will pass into their very bowels and wring them with despair and sore distress; life will be made unstable and suspended as it were to a halter by one terror succeeding another, day and night, hustling the soul up and down, so that in the morning they will pray for evening and in the evening for morning through the palpable miseries of their waking hours and the horrible dreams which appear to them in sleep.", |
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"[152] The proselyte exalted aloft by his happy lot will be gazed at from all sides, marvelled at and held blessed by all for two things of highest excellence, that he came over to the camp of God and that he has won a prize best suited to his merits, a place in heaven firmly fixed, greater than words dare describe, while the nobly born who has falsified the sterling of his high lineage will be dragged right down and carried into Tartarus itself and profound darkness. Thus may all men seeing these examples be brought to a wiser mind and learn that God welcomes the virtue which springs from ignoble birth, that He takes no account of the roots but accepts the full-grown stem, because it has been changed from a weed into fruitfulness." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[153] When the cities have been thus consumed by fire and the country made desolate, the land will begin to take breath and raise its head—that land so long roughly handled in the grip of the intolerable violence shown by the inhabitants, who chased the virgin Sevens into banishment both from the country and from their thoughts. For the sole, or to speak more cautiously, the chief feasts appointed by nature are the recurrence of the sevenths in days and years, days to give rest to men, years to the country.", |
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"[154] But they have closed their eyes to the whole of this law, to the salt, to the libations, to the altar of mercy, to the common hearth, all which have served as bonds of friendship and goodwill, all of them produced by Seven and embraced in Seven. On men they have laid a heavy burden, the stronger oppressing the weaker, by making the tasks which they impose continuous and unbroken: on the fields, by ever pursuing unjust gains in the coveteousness of their hearts, lust at the base and on it impulses to action unjust and unrestrained, which never can be satisfied.", |
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"[155] Instead of granting to men who in absolute truth were their brethren, children of one mother their common nature, the appointed holiday after every six days, and to the land after every six years its time of release from the burden of sowing and planting lest it become exhausted by repeated labours,", |
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"[156] they set at nought their kindly admonitions which call to gentleness. They oppressed the souls and bodies of all whom they could with perpetual hardships and undermined the strength of the deep soiled field while they accumulated wealth insatiably by levying tributes greater than it could bear and broke it down utterly through its whole extent by tolls exacted not only annually but daily.", |
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"[157] For this they themselves will receive the full measure of curses and penalties named above, but the land unstrung by the numberless mishandlings which it has undergone will now be relieved, disburdened of the heavy weight of its impious inhabitants. And when she looks around and sees none of the destroyers of her former pride and high name, sees her market places void of turmoil and war and wrongdoing, but full of tranquillity and peace and justice, she will renew her youth and bloom and take her rest calm and serene during the festal seasons of the sacred Seven, rallying her strength like a wrestler after his first bout.", |
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"[158] Then like a fond mother she will pity the sons and daughters whom she has lost, who in death and still more when in life were a grief to their parents. Young once more she will be fruitful and bear a blameless generation to redress the one that went before. For she that is desolate, says the prophet, will have children many and fine, a saying which also is an allegory of the history of the soul.", |
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"[159] For when the soul is “many,” full that is of passions and vices with her children, pleasures, desires, folly, incontinence, injustice, gathered around her, she is feeble and sick and dangerously near to death. But when she has become barren and ceases to produce these children or indeed has cast them out bodily she is transformed into a pure virgin.", |
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"[160] Then receiving the divine seed she moulds it into shape and brings forth new life in forms of precious quality and marvellous loveliness, wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, holiness, piety and the other virtues and good emotions. Not only is it well that these goodly children should be brought to the birth, but good also is the expectation of this birth, the forecast cheering the soul’s weakness with hope.", |
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"[161] Hope is joy before joy, falling short of the perfection of the other yet superior to its successor in two ways, one that it relaxes with its unction the aridity of our cares, the other that it goes before as a harbinger of the plenitude of good which is to be." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[162] I have now described without any reservation the curses and penalties which they will deservedly suffer who disregard the holy laws of justice and piety, who have been seduced by the polytheistic creeds which finally lead to atheism and have forgotten the teaching of their race and of their fathers, in which they were trained from their earliest years to acknowledge the One in substance, the supreme God, to whom alone all must belong who follow truth unfeigned instead of mythical figments.", |
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"[163] If however they accept these chastisements as a warning rather than as intending their perdition, if shamed into a whole-hearted conversion, they reproach themselves for going thus astray, and make a full confession and acknowledgement of all their sin, first within themselves with a mind so purged that their conscience is sincere and free from lurking taint, secondly with their tongues to bring their hearers to a better way, then they will find favour with God the Saviour, the Merciful, who has bestowed on mankind that peculiar and chiefest gift of kinship with His own Word, from whom as its archetype the human mind was created.", |
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"[164] For even though they dwell in the uttermost parts of the earth, in slavery to those who led them away captive, one signal, as it were, one day will bring liberty to all. This conversion in a body to virtue will strike awe into their masters, who will set them free, ashamed to rule over men better than themselves." |
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], |
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[ |
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"[165] When they have gained this unexpected liberty, those who but now were scattered in Greece and the outside world over islands and continents will arise and post from every side with one impulse to the one appointed place, guided in their pilgrimage by a vision divine and superhuman unseen by others but manifest to them as they pass from exile to their home.", |
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"[166] Three intercessors they have to plead for their reconciliation with the Father. One is the clemency and kindness of Him to whom they appeal, who ever prefers forgiveness to punishment. The second is the holiness of the founders of the race because with souls released from their bodies they show forth in that naked simplicity their devotion to their Ruler and cease not to make supplications for their sons and daughters, supplications not made in vain, because the Father grants to them the privilege that their prayers should be heard.", |
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"[167] The third is one which more than anything else moves the loving kindness of the other two to come forward so readily, and that is the reformation working in those who are being brought to make a covenant of peace, those who after much toil have been able to pass from the pathless wild to the road which has no other goal but to find favour with God, as sons may with their father.", |
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"[168] When they have arrived, the cities which but now lay in ruins will be cities once more; the desolate land will be inhabited; the barren will change into fruitfulness; all the prosperity of their fathers and ancestors will seem a tiny fragment, so lavish will be the abundant riches in their possession, which flowing from the gracious bounties of God as from a perennial fountain will bring to each individually and to all in common a deep stream of wealth leaving no room for envy.", |
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"[169] Everything will suddenly be reversed, God will turn the curses against the enemies of these penitents, the enemies who rejoiced in the misfortunes of the nation and mocked and railed at them, thinking that they themselves would have a heritage which nothing could destroy and which they hoped to leave to their children and descendants in due succession; thinking too that they would always see their opponents in a firmly established and unchanging adversity which would be reserved for the generations that followed them.", |
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"[170] In their infatuation they did not understand that the short-lived brilliance which they had enjoyed had been given them not for their own sakes but as a lesson to others, who had subverted the institutions of their fathers, and therefore grief—the very painful feeling aroused by the sight of their enemy’s good fortune—was devised as a medicine to save them from perdition.", |
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"So then those of them who have not come to utter destruction, in tears and groans lamenting their own lapse, will make their way back with course reversed to the prosperity of the ancestral past.", |
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"[171] But these enemies who have mocked at their lamentations, proclaimed public holidays on the days of their misfortunes, feasted on their mourning, in general made the unhappiness of others their own happiness, will, when they begin to reap the rewards of their cruelty, find that their misconduct was directed not against the obscure and unmeritable but against men of high lineage retaining sparks of their noble birth, which have to be but fanned into a flame, and from them shines out the glory which for a little while was quenched.", |
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"[172] For just as when the stalks of plants are cut away, if the roots are left undestroyed, new growths shoot up which supersede the old, so too if in the soul a tiny seed be left of the qualities which promote virtue, though other things have been stripped away, still from that little seed spring forth the fairest and most precious things in human life, by which states are constituted manned with good citizens, and nations grow into a great population." |
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] |
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], |
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"Appendix": [ |
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"APPENDIX TO DE PRAEMIIS ET POENIS", |
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"(The title.) This, which is given by Cohn as printed here, except that I have ventured to mark a doubt as to the fitness of the addition περὶ ἀρῶν, is founded on Eusebius, <i>Hist. Eccl.</i> ii. 18. 5, who in enumerating the works of Philo known to him speaks of this as τὸ περὶ τῶν προκειμένων τοῖς μὲν ἀγαθοῖς ἄθλων τοῖς δὲ πονηροῖς ἐπιτιμίων καὶ ἀρῶν. But if Eusebius is to be understood as giving a formal title traceable to Philo himself, is there any reason why it should not be given in full? In itself the title does not seem very appropriate. If the “curses” are to be distinguished from the “punishments,” the “blessings” must also be distinguished from the “rewards.”", |
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"§§ 4–6. The allusion may perhaps be to the conduct, good or bad, of the people in the wilderness after the Sinaitic giving of the Law, but as the warnings are so largely drawn from Deuteronomy, which Philo accepts as Moses’ final message, it seems more likely that he is thinking of the subsequent history. If so, and indeed in any case, the absence of any definite notice of persons or events, and of any attempt to draw the moral which the books themselves draw of the punishment of the people for apostasy and their restoration on repentance, is remarkable. The only person of whom anything substantial is said is Samuel, and what is said of him has no historical bearing. And this is still more true of Gideon, who is mentioned in <i>De Conf.</i> 130.", |
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"§ 8. <i>Triptolemus</i>. The story told here is given by Ovid, <i>Met.</i> v. 642 ff. Ceres harnessed two winged dragons or snakes to her car and sent it to Athens to Triptolemus, who rode in it through the air over Europe and Asia and scattered the corn seeds. In Verg. <i>Georg.</i> i. 19 he is also the inventor of the plough.", |
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"§ 23. (Noah and Deucalion.) This identification is, I think, unique in Philo. Though he often mentions Greek mythical personages, and not always with signs of disbelief (<i>e.g.</i> Pasiphaë in <i>Spec. Leg.</i> iii. 44 f.), he nowhere equates them with Old Testament characters. (The identification of the Aloeidae with the Babel-builders which Mangey suggested at <i>De Som.</i> ii. 283 is quite impossible, see my note there.) As for this particular identification, which of course is especially easy, neither Mangey nor Cohn quote any real parallel. Cohn indeed notes that Theophilus, a Christian writer of the late second century A.D., thought that the Greeks had given the name of Deucalion to Noah because he said δεῦτε καλεῖ ὑμᾶς ὁ θεὸς εἰς μετάνοιαν, but I have seen no evidence that it was made by Jews of Philo’s time. The nearest parallel I have found is in Malchus, otherwise called Cleodemus, on whom see Schürer, <i>Jewish People</i> (Eng. trans.) ii. 3, pp. 209 f. Malchus stated that Abraham’s three sons by Keturah accompanied Heracles to Libya, and that Heracles married the daughter of one of them. Schürer calls Malchus “a classic example of that intermixture of Oriental and Greek tradition which was popular throughout the region of Hellenism.” But none of the Graeco-Jewish writers whom he mentions show anything really similar.", |
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"§ 44. μετακληθεὶς. To understand this of the change of name from Jacob to Israel is certainly tempting, though we might have expected Philo to enlarge a little more on the point, if he mentions it at all. Also there is no particular point in speaking of Jacob here as summoned or invited by God. And it would be natural enough for μετα- in this compound as in so many others to express change. On the other hand there is no authority for the usage; Tzetzes (twelfth century A.D.), cited by Stephanus, can hardly count. Philo uses the word elsewhere in the sense of “summoned” or perhaps “summoned away” (<i>De Som.</i> i. 188 cannot be quoted as an exception; see note on vol. v. pp. 601 ff.), and what is perhaps more important, throughout <i>De Mut.</i> 57–129, where he treats at length of the changes of name, including that of Jacob, he uses μετονομάζω. The other reading καταβληθεὶς has, on Cohn’s principles, inferior authority and would of course require correction. Mangey suggested κατηχηθεὶς=“instructed,” and translated “informatus.” Perhaps κατελεηθεὶς, <i>cf.</i> ἠλέησε in § 39.", |
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"§ 46. (Monad and dyad.) The doctrine is the same as that ascribed to the Pythagoreans by Diogenes Laertius viii. 25 ἀρχὴν μὲν ἁπάντων μονάδα· ἐκ δὲ τῆς μονάδος ἀόριστον δυάδα ὡς ἂν ὕλην τῇ μονάδι αὐτῷ αἰτίῳ ὄντι ὑποστῆναι· ἐκ δὲ τῆς μονάδος καὶ τῆς ἀορίστου δυάδος τοὺς ἀριθμούς, “the principle of all things is the monad or unit; arising from the monad the undefined dyad or two serves as material substratum to the monad which is cause; from the monad and undefined dyad spring numbers” (Hicks). The passage continues that “from numbers come points, from points lines, from lines plane figures, from plane figures solid figures, from solid figures sensible bodies,” whence ultimately the universe. With the epithet “undefined” (ἀόριστος) here applied to the dyad, that is, passive matter, compare its application to αἰσθητὴ φύσις in § 36. A fuller discussion of these ideas is given by Zeller, <i>Presocratic Philosophy</i> (Eng. trans.), vol. i. pp. 387 ff.", |
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"§§ 49–51. As suggested in Gen. Introd. to vol. vi. p. xi. this passage gives the best clue to Philo’s meaning in adapting to spiritual experience and applying to the three Patriarchs the formula “Nature, Instruction, Practice” which runs through ancient educational literature from Plato and Aristotle to Cicero and Quintilian. Except possibly in the case of Jacob this application does not rest on the history of the three. The starting-point is that Isaac’s name means “joy,” and Philo would argue that in education joy is the characteristic of the student who learns naturally and instinctively. Carried over to the spiritual sphere, joy is the characteristic of the soul which instinctively knows God’s will, has not any temptation to disobey it and finds a ground for rejoicing even in what would naturally be displeasing (<i>cf.</i> § 30). So with Abraham. In education readiness to believe belongs to the mind which is most susceptible to teaching; and though Abraham’s name does not, like Isaac’s, supply a suitable clue, the emphasis laid on his faith in Genesis fits him to represent Instruction. The argument needed to fit Jacob into the formula is more strained. But his second name of Israel = “Seeing God,” does express the attainment which is the result of practice, and his history, which, though Philo does not suggest it, was subjected to more vicissitudes than the other two, would assist the idea.", |
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"In education it was recognized that all three were indispensable, though in different degrees, to every mind for successful study, and Quintilian stresses this in <i>Inst. Pr.</i> 27. Philo makes the same point for the spiritual life in <i>De Abr.</i> 53.", |
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"§ 55. (Definition of νόμος.) Cohn rightly calls attention to this, as the accepted definition of νόμος by the Stoics (see Index to <i>S.V.F. s.v.</i>). The more exact form seems to be λόγος ὀρθὸς προστάττων(προστακτικός), κτλ. or sometimes λόγος φύσεως, κτλ. So Cic. <i>De Leg.</i> i. 6. 18 “lex est ratio summa insita in natura, quae iubet ea quae facienda sunt, prohibetque contraria.” Philo quotes it in this form in <i>De Ios.</i> 29. <i>Cf.</i> also <i>Mos.</i> ii. 4, where, as here, he connects it with kingship.", |
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"§ 60. σπορὰν … ἥμερον. ἥμερος when applied to vegetation of any kind often means simply “cultivated,” as opposed to “wild.” So e.g. <i>Spec. Leg.</i> iv. 209, but at other times it takes on something of what it connotes when applied to animals or men, <i>i.e.</i> the qualities of a domesticated animal or a civilized man. So in § 8, where it is applied to bread-food as opposed to acorns, the translation “kindly,” though not quite satisfactory, gives the meaning better than “cultivated” would. Here too the meaning is, I think, more than “thriving” alone would give (Cohn, “gut gedeihen”). The crop is “responsive” to the trouble taken on it.", |
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"§ 65. (The twelve sons of Jacob and the Zodiac.) For this connexion of the twelve tribes and their founders with the Twelve Signs <i>cf.</i> <i>De Som.</i> ii. 111 ff., where Philo is discussing Gen. 37:9–11, where Joseph says “the sun and moon and eleven stars did obeisance to me,” thus “classing himself as the twelfth to complete the Zodiac.”", |
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"It seems to be agreed that the Signs are mentioned in Job 38:32 under the name of the Mazzaroth (a word copied without translation by the LXX), and many modern scholars have thought that Gen. 37:9 actually refers to them, some indeed finding traces of them in the blessing of Jacob in ch. 49. Whether this is so or not, Philo naturally took the words so, but the tone of that passage, where Joseph’s presumption is condemned, is very different from this, where the twelve tribes are the earthly counterpart of the twelve great heavenly bodies. It would be interesting to know how far the idea was current in Philo’s time. An article by Feuchtwanger, in <i>Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums</i>, 1915, pp. 241–267, gives an account of the place held by the Zodiac in Rabbinical tradition, but mostly in later times, and does not dwell much upon its relation to the tribes and their founders. One point mentioned (also by the <i>Jewish Encyclopaedia, s.v.</i> Zodiac) is the tradition that each of the tribes had one of the Signs on its banner.", |
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"§ 78. (The lacuna.) This evidently contained the end of the story of Korah and something at the beginning of the Blessings. But was there anything else? I think that there is good reason to think that there was something, and perhaps a good deal. Eight examples have been given of rewards against two of punishments. Also in § 7 he has classified both under five heads, individuals, families, cities, nations and countries, great regions of the earth. In <i>Mos.</i> ii. 53–56 he has signalized the Flood and the destruction of the cities of the plain as the two great judgements of God upon the unrighteous. These fit the fifth and third of the heads, and it is unlikely that he would fail to mention them here whether briefly or at length. Possibly he may have cited also the disasters which befell the Egyptians through the plagues and at the Red Sea to cover “nations and countries.”", |
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"If it is objected that, while he has stated that the rewards also fall under the five heads, he is content to stop at the second, one answer might be that the expansion of Jacob’s family into a great nation, with its “orderly cities, schools of wisdom, justice and religion” (§ 66), though mentioned as the reward of Jacob’s family, is also a reward to the nation and its cities. But a better answer is that, apart from this, there were no good examples of the other heads to give. The preservation of Zoar might have been quoted as an example of a city rewarded, though this is not in Genesis ascribed to its merits, but otherwise what record is there in the Pentateuch of any larger nation or city being so rewarded? I think we must conclude that § 7 is loosely worded, and that the full classification applies only to the punishments.", |
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"The part lost at the beginning of the Blessings need not have been more than a single sentence stating that Moses promised that in the future also prosperity would be the reward of obedience and misfortune of disobedience.", |
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"§ 87. (Pacification of wild beasts.) Philo has no authority for this in the Pentateuch beyond Lev. 26:6 “I will destroy evil (or wicked) beasts out of your land.” It seems to me impossible to doubt that he is thinking of Isaiah 11:6–9 or perhaps rather that he reads the text in Leviticus in the light of Isaiah; that is a straining of which he is not incapable. I do not understand Heinemann’s remark (<i>Bildung</i>‚ p. 419), that “it is noteworthy that he does not appeal to Isaiah xi.” Apparently he thinks that Philo has no direct knowledge of that passage (“schwerlich hat er von dieser Stelle unmittelbare Kenntniss”). If this means that the absence of any direct statement that the thought comes from Isaiah shows ignorance of the passage, I entirely disagree. Philo never mentions Isaiah by name, but quotes from him four times as one of the prophets and once (<i>Quis Rerum</i> 25, Isaiah 50:4) without any indication that it is a quotation. Here he gives the substance of Isaiah’s description spiritualized by the thought that this can never come about till the “wild beasts within ourselves” are tamed, a thought which to his mind, in which the allegorical is always seen behind the literal, would be assisted by the epithet πονηρά = “wicked,” applied to the beasts in Leviticus.", |
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"Besides Isaiah, Philo may have had in mind Job 5:23 (of the righteous) “the savage beasts shall be at peace with them,” and still more, Hosea 2:18 “I will make for them in that day a covenant with the wild beasts of the field, and the birds of heaven, and the reptiles of the earth.” Both these books were known to him and are quoted (Job being mentioned by name).", |
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"Heinemann goes on to say that Philo must certainly have drawn from the “Wise Sayings” (Weissagungen), for which he gives a reference to the <i>Sibylline Oracles</i> iii. 788, since the Greek pictures of the “Beast-peace” are by no means so authoritative as to have given him the conception. This may be true, but it seems to me that he could find enough authority in Scripture itself.", |
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"§ 89. <i>Maltese dogs</i>. This breed is mentioned by Strabo vi. p. 277, by Athenaeus xii. p. 518 (of the Sybarites ἔχαιρον τοῖς Μελιταίοις κυνιδίοις), and by Pliny, <i>Hist. Nat.</i> iii. 26, where they are called “catulos.”", |
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"§ 111. τοῖς ὀνόμασι κυρίοις. κύρια ὀνόματα, said in L. & S. to signify “authorized, proper or literal words,” are, according to Aristot. <i>Rhet.</i> iii. 2. 2, ordinary words as opposed to those which are figurative, foreign, archaic or in any way uncommon (Cope). Philo often uses the phrase for a proper or personal name (<i>e.g.</i> <i>Mos.</i> ii. 207: people do not as a rule address a parent by his κύριον ὄνομα), but more often for a word which exactly expresses its meaning, <i>e.g.</i> <i>De Conf.</i> 192, Moses when he spoke of God “confounding” the languages at Babel did not mean that He divided them, for then he would have used a κυριώτερον such as τομή or διάκρισις. Sometimes it means a word which brings out some true or striking aspect, <i>e.g. Quod Deus 139</i>, “seers” (ὁρῶντες) was a κύριον ὄνομα for prophets. Here the use is extended further. “Day” is κύριον, because it expresses the lesson which Philo draws more exactly than “years” for instance would, and “number” is κύριον, because it brings out a similar lesson more exactly than “<i>all</i> thy days” would. Thus the phrase has been made to mean something almost the opposite of what we should call literal, and so also does the phrase “literally true” as often used in English. (See also note to <i>Mos.</i> ii. 38 (vol. vi. p. 606).)", |
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"§ 111. οὔτʼ ἐν λόγῳ … οὔτʼ ἐν ἀριθμῷ. Mangey quotes Iamblichus, <i>Vita Pythagorae</i> 208, where it is said that his disciples who remembered him told how", |
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"τοὺς μὲν ἑταίρους ἦγεν ἴσον μακαρέσσι θεοῖσι, <br>τοὺς δʼ ἄλλους ἡγεῖτʼ οὔτʼ ἐν λόγῳ οὔτʼ ἐν ἀριθμῷ.", |
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"<i>Cf.</i> also Callimachus, <i>Ep.</i> 25, and Theocritus xiv. 48, where it is in the form", |
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"οὔτε λόγω τινὸς ἄξιοι οὔτʼ ἀριθματοί.", |
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"§ 123. <i>In which God … walks as in a palace</i>. St. Paul, quoting freely Lev. 26:12, also gives ἐν the sense of “in” rather than “among” in 2 Cor. 6:16 “We are the temple of the living God; as God said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them” (so E.V. rightly).", |
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"§ 154. (The symbols of peace.) Salt has been used in this sense, <i>De Ios.</i> 210, and joined with libations in <i>Spec. Leg.</i> iii. 96. On the altar of mercy Mangey says that there was an altar of that name at Athens founded by the descendants of Heracles and used as an asylum for suppliants. I do not know what evidence he has for his statement about the founders. He refers to the scholiast on Soph. <i>O.C.</i> 260 ἐπεὶ καὶ Ἐλέου βωμὸς ἐν Ἀθήναις ἵδρυται, and Pausanias (presumably of Athens) τοὺς εἰς ἐλέου βωμὸν καταφυγόντας ἀσυλίαν ἔχειν. He does not give the reference for this, but see Paus. i. 17 Ἀθηναίοις δὲ ἐν τῇ ἀγορᾷ καὶ ἄλλα ἐστὶν οὐκ ἐς ἅπαντας ἐπίσημα καὶ Ἐλέου βωμός, ᾧ μάλιστα θεῶν ἐς ἀνθρώπινον βίον καὶ μεταβολὰς πραγμάτων ὅτι ὠφέλιμος, μόνοι τιμὰς Ἑλλήνων νέμουσιν Ἀθηναῖοι. If, judging from this, we may take the Altar of Mercy as an allusion to the Athenian institution, it might give some ground for giving κοινὴ ἑστία‚ which otherwise might be taken in a general way, as in <i>De Virt.</i> 124, the special sense of the altar placed in the Prytaneium of a city for state sacrifices, or the further hospitality given to ambassadors and others. See references in L. & S. and more fully in Stephanus.", |
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"§ 154. <i>All are through Seven and are Seven</i>. Cohn translates “denn alles geschieht mit Hilfe des Sabbats und ist Sabbatfeier.” Here, by giving Sabbath for ἑβδομάς, as he generally does, he fails to express the potency and sanctity of the number itself. Mangey has “omnia vel sunt hebdomas vel pertinent ad hebdomadem.” Both these seem to take πάντα as = “all things in general” rather than “they all,” <i>i.e.</i> the symbols just mentioned. I have not noticed any real parallel to this. In <i>Spec. Leg.</i> ii. 156, speaking of the feast of unleavened bread which is held for seven days “to mark the precedence and honour which the number holds in the universe,” he adds, “the sacred seven which He intended to be the source and fountain to men of all good things.” For “all are seven” <i>cf. De Fug. 173</i> “Peace and Seven are identical.” Both these point to limiting the scope of πάντα.", |
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"§ 171. <i>The days of their misfortunes</i> (or <i>inauspicious days</i>.) See on <i>Spec. Leg.</i> iii. 183. Is there any specific allusion?", |
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"Massebieau’s translation “decreed that they (the Jews) should observe their ill-omened (or abominable) public festivals” can hardly be got out of the Greek. Possibly “their fast-days.” The Law knows of only one regular fast-day, the Day of Atonement. But after the Captivity four such were appointed (<i>Jewish Encyclopaedia</i> on Fasting and Fast-days). Heinemann, <i>Bildung</i>, p. 97, says that Philo betrays no knowledge of them, but on the other hand, in describing the Law he has no occasion to do so. But, on the whole, it seems better to take the words generally of what naturally happens to a conquered nation. The celebration of the conqueror’s victories is a celebration of their defeat." |
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] |
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}, |
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"versions": [ |
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[ |
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"Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1939", |
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"https://www.nli.org.il/en/books/NNL_ALEPH001216057/NLI" |
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] |
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], |
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"heTitle": "על השכר והעונש", |
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"categories": [ |
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"Second Temple", |
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"Philo" |
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], |
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"schema": { |
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"heTitle": "על השכר והעונש", |
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"enTitle": "On Rewards and Punishments", |
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"key": "On Rewards and Punishments", |
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"nodes": [ |
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{ |
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"heTitle": "הקדמה", |
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"enTitle": "Introduction" |
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}, |
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{ |
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"heTitle": "", |
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"enTitle": "" |
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}, |
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{ |
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"heTitle": "הערות", |
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"enTitle": "Appendix" |
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} |
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] |
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} |
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} |