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| Chapter III.—The True Excellence of Man.
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Chapter III.—The True Excellence of Man.
The most of men have a disposition unstable and
heedless, like the nature of storms. “Want of faith has done
many good things, and faith evil things.” And Epicharmus says,
“Don’t forget to exercise incredulity; for it is the
sinews of the soul.” Now, to disbelieve truth brings death, as
to believe, life; and again, to believe the lie and to disbelieve the
truth hurries to destruction. The same is the case with self-restraint
and licentiousness. To restrain one’s self from doing good is the
work of vice; but to keep from wrong is the beginning of salvation. So the
Sabbath, by abstinence from evils, seems to indicate self-restraint. And
what, I ask, is it in which man differs from beasts, and the angels
of God, on the other hand, are wiser than he? “Thou madest him
a little lower than the angels.”2682
For some do not interpret
this Scripture of the Lord, although He also bore flesh, but of the
perfect man and the gnostic, inferior in comparison with the angels in
time, and by reason of the vesture [of the body]. I call then wisdom
nothing but science, since life differs not from life. For to live
is common to the mortal nature, that is to man, with that to which
has been vouchsafed immortality; as also the faculty of contemplation
and of self-restraint, one of the two being more excellent. On this
ground Pythagoras seems to me to have said that God alone is wise,
since also the apostle writes in the Epistle to the Romans, “For
the obedience of the faith among all nations, being made known to the
only wise God through Jesus Christ;”2683
and that he himself was
a philosopher, on account of his friendship with God. Accordingly it is
said, “God talked with Moses as a friend with a friend.”2684
That, then, which is true being clear to God, forthwith generates
truth. And the gnostic loves the truth. “Go,” it is said,
“to the ant, thou sluggard, and be the disciple of the bee;”
thus speaks Solomon.2685
For if there is one function belonging to the
peculiar nature of each creature, alike of the ox, and horse, and dog,
what shall we say is the peculiar function of man? He is like, it appears
to me, the Centaur, a Thessalian figment, compounded of a rational and
irrational part, of soul and body. Well, the body tills the ground,
and hastes to it; but the soul is raised to God: trained in the true
philosophy, it speeds to its kindred above, turning away from the lusts
of the body, and besides these, from toil and fear, although we have
shown that patience and fear belong to the good man. For if “by
the law is the knowledge of sin,”2686
as those allege who disparage
the law, and “till the law sin was in the world;”2687
yet
“without the law sin was dead,”2688
we oppose them. For when you
take away the cause of fear, sin, you have taken away fear; and much
more, punishment, when you have taken away that which gives rise to
lust. “For the law is not made for the just
man,”2689
says the
Scripture. Well, then, says Heraclitus, “They would not have known
the name of Justice if these things had not been.” And Socrates
says, “that the law was not made for the sake of the good.”
But the cavillers did not know even this, as the apostle says, “that
he who loveth his brother worketh not evil;” for this, “Thou
shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal; and
if there be any other commandment, it is comprehended in the word, Thou
shall love thy neighbour as thyself.”2690
So also is it said,
“Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”2691
And “if he that loveth
his neighbour worketh no evil,” and if “every commandment is
comprehended in this, the loving our neighbour,” the commandments,
by menacing with fear, work love, not hatred. Wherefore the law is
productive of the emotion of fear. “So that the law is holy,”
and in truth “spiritual,”2692
according to the
apostle. We must, then, as is fit, in investigating the nature of the body
and the essence of the soul, apprehend the end of each, and not regard
death as an evil. “For when ye were the servants of sin,”
says the apostle, “ye were free from righteousness. What fruit
had ye then in those things in which ye are now ashamed? For the end
of those things is death. But now, being made free from sin, and become
servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting
life. For the wages of sin is death: but the gift of God is eternal
life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”2693
The assertion, then,
may be hazarded, that it has been shown that death is the fellowship
of the soul in a state of sin with the body; and life the separation
from sin. And many are the stakes and ditches of lust which impede us,
and the pits of wrath and anger which must be overleaped, and all the
machinations we must avoid of those who plot against us,—who would
no longer see the knowledge of God “through a glass.”
“The half of virtue the far-seeing Zeus takes
From man, when he reduces him to a state of slavery.”
As slaves the Scripture views
those “under sin” and “sold to sin,” the lovers
of pleasure and of the body; and beasts rather than men, “those who
have become like to cattle, horses, neighing after their neighbours’
wives.”2694
The licentious is “the lustful ass,” the
covetous is the “savage wolf,” and the deceiver is “a
serpent.” The severance, therefore, of the soul from the body,
made a life-long study, produces in the philosopher gnostic alacrity, so
that he is easily able to bear natural death, which is the dissolution
of the chains which bind the soul to the body. “For the world
is crucified to me, and I to the world,” the [apostle] says;
“and now I live, though in the flesh, as having my conversation in
heaven.”2695
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