Stromateis 1 part 27/42

Again, both the whole poetic muse and Greek philosophy alike have stolen, from the barbarian philosophy, the punishments after death and the retribution by fire.

Plato, then, in the final book of the Republic, says in these very words:

'There, then, wild men, fiery to behold, standing by and hearing the pronouncement, took some aside privately and led them away; but Ardiaeus and the others they bound hand and foot and head, threw down, and flayed, and dragged them along the road outside, tearing them on thorn-bushes.'

For by 'the fiery men' he means to signify angels, who take hold of the unjust and punish them;

as it is said, 'who makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire.'

It follows from this that the soul is immortal.

For that which is punished or disciplined, being possessed of sensation, lives, even if it is said to suffer.

But what of this? Does not Plato also know of rivers of fire and the depths of the earth, poetically naming what the barbarians call Gehenna 'Tartarus,' and introducing Cocytus and Acheron and Pyriphlegethon and such places of punishment for chastening correction? And, concerning the little ones and least, according to Scripture, whose angels behold God, and further showing the oversight that comes to us through the angels set over us, he does not hesitate to write:

'He chose a guardian spirit to accompany him through life, as protector and fulfiller of what he had chosen.'

Perhaps, too, this is what the divine sign hinted at for Socrates as well.

Indeed, the philosophers, having received from Moses that the world came into being, made it a doctrine.

And Plato has stated this quite plainly:

'Has it always existed, having no beginning of generation, or has it come into being, beginning from some starting point? It has come into being.'

'For being visible it is tangible, and being tangible it also has a body.'

Again, when he says, 'to find the maker and father of this universe is a task,' he not only showed that the world was created, but also indicates that it came into being from him, as it were a son, and that he is called its father, inasmuch as it was generated from him alone and came into existence out of what did not exist.

The Stoics, too, hold that the world is generated.

As for the one so often spoken of by the barbarian philosophy — the devil, the ruler of the demons — Plato, in the tenth book of the Laws, says that he is an evil-working soul, in the following words:

'Since soul directs and indwells all things that move in every way, must we not say that it necessarily also directs the heaven? Indeed. One soul, or more than one? More than one — I shall answer on your behalf.'

'Let us posit no fewer than two, at any rate — the beneficent one, and the one capable of accomplishing the contrary.'

Similarly, in the Phaedrus too, he writes as follows:

'There are indeed other evils too, but some spirit has mixed pleasure into most of them for the present moment.'

But also in the tenth book of the Laws, he plainly points to that apostolic saying:

'Our struggle is not against blood and flesh, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the spiritual forces in the heavens' — writing something to this effect:

'Since we have granted among ourselves that heaven is full of many good things, but also of their opposites, and more of the latter than the former, such a battle, we say, is immortal and requires wondrous vigilance.'

Again, the barbarian philosophy knows a twofold world: the intelligible and the sensible — the one the archetype, the other the image of what is called the exemplar;

and it assigns the former to the monad, as being intelligible, and the sensible to the hexad;

for among the Pythagoreans, six is called 'marriage,' as being a generative number.

And in the monad it constitutes an invisible heaven, a formless earth, and an intelligible light;

for it says, 'In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth';

but in the sensible cosmogony it fashions a solid heaven (for the solid belongs to the sensible), and a visible earth, and light that is seen.

Does it not seem to you, then, that from this Plato leaves the ideas of living creatures behind in the intelligible world, and that the intelligible forms fashion the sensible species according to their kinds? Fittingly, then, Moses says that the body was fashioned out of earth — what Plato calls the 'earthly tabernacle' — while the rational soul was breathed in from above by God, into the face.

For they say that the ruling faculty is seated there, interpreting the entrance of the soul through the sense organs as the entry that occurred in the first-formed man; wherefore also man was made 'according to image and likeness.'

For the image of God is the divine and royal Word, the man beyond suffering, while the image of the image is the human mind.

But if you wish to take this assimilation under another name, you would find in Moses this 'following' called divine:

'You shall walk after the Lord your God, and keep his commandments.'

And all the virtuous, I think, are followers and servants of God.

Hence the Stoics have said that the end of philosophy is to live in accordance with nature, whereas Plato said it is likeness to God (as we set forth in the second Stromateus);

And Zeno the Stoic, having taken it from Plato, who in turn took it from the barbarian philosophy, says that all the good are friends of one another.

For Socrates says in the Phaedrus that it is not fated for a bad man to be a friend to a bad man, nor for a good man not to be a friend to a good man — a point which he also demonstrated sufficiently in the Lysis, namely that friendship could never be preserved in injustice and wickedness.

...that an action is friendly and follows God and holds to one ancient principle: that like is friend to like when it is moderate, but the immoderate is friend neither to the immoderate nor to the moderate.

And God would be for us the measure of all things.

Then, further on, he adds again:

For every good man is like the good, and in this respect, being like God also, he is a friend both to every good man and to God.

Having come to this point, I was reminded also of that saying:

For at the end of the Timaeus he says that the one who understands must assimilate himself to the object of understanding according to his original nature, and that, having assimilated himself, he attains the goal of the best life set before man by the gods, both for the present time and for the time to come.

For those sayings have the same force as these:

He who seeks will not cease until he finds;

and having found, he will be amazed; and having been amazed, he will reign; and having reigned, he will rest.

But what of this? Are not those sayings of Thales also dependent on these? He plainly interprets, in agreement with our own teaching, that God is glorified unto the ages of ages, and is called the Knower of hearts.

For when Thales was asked what the divine is, he said, 'That which has neither beginning nor end.'

And when another asked whether a man escapes the notice of the divine when he does something, he said, 'How could he, seeing that not even his thoughts do?' Indeed, barbarian philosophy alone knows that the noble alone is good, and that virtue is sufficient for happiness, whenever it says:

'Behold, I have set before your eyes the good and the evil, life and death.'

For it calls the good 'life,' and calls the choosing of this 'noble,' while it calls the choosing of the opposite 'evil.'

And the one end of the good and of life is to become a lover of God;

for this is your life and length of days, to love truly.

But the following statements are clearer still:

For the Savior, having commanded us to love God and our neighbor, says that on these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets.

These are the doctrines the Stoics keep repeating, and before them Socrates, praying in the Phaedrus, said:

O Pan and all you other gods, grant that I may become beautiful within.

And in the Theaetetus he says plainly:

for he who speaks well is both noble and good.

And in the Protagoras he confesses to Protagoras's companions that he has met with one more beautiful than Alcibiades, if indeed the wisest is the most beautiful.

For he said that virtue is the beauty of the soul, and, conversely, that vice is the ugliness of the soul.

Antipater the Stoic, then, having written three books on the thesis that, according to Plato, only the noble is good, demonstrates that according to Plato too virtue is sufficient for happiness, and he sets forth a good many other doctrines in agreement with the Stoics.

Aristobulus, who lived in the time of Ptolemy Philometor and is mentioned by the author of the epitome of the Maccabean history, wrote a number of substantial books in which he demonstrates that the Peripatetic philosophy is dependent both upon the Law of Moses and upon the rest of the prophets.

That we are brothers, inasmuch as we belong to one God and one teacher, Plato too appears somewhere to be saying, when he addresses us in something like these words:

'For you are all brothers, all who dwell in the city,' as we shall say to them in telling the myth, 'but the god, in fashioning you, mixed gold into those of you who are fit to rule, wherefore they are the most honored;'

'and into those who are auxiliaries, silver;'

'and iron and bronze into the farmers and the other craftsmen.'

Hence, he says, it has come to be necessary for these to embrace and love the things that pertain to knowledge, and for those, the things that pertain to opinion.

For perhaps he is divining, as it were, this elect nature that yearns for knowledge — unless indeed, positing three natures, he is describing three polities, as some have supposed: the Jews' being of silver, that of the Greeks being the third, and that of the Christians, in which the royal gold — the Holy Spirit — has been mingled in.

And in setting forth the life of Christians, he writes, word for word, in the Theaetetus:

'Let us speak, then, concerning the leading men.'

'they neither see nor hear of a lawcourt, or a council-chamber, or any other common assembly of the city, nor of written laws and decrees.'

'And the ambitions of political clubs, and their gatherings, and revels with flute-girls — it never even occurs to them in a dream to take part in these.'

'And whether someone has fared well or badly in the city, or what evil has befallen someone because of his ancestors, escapes their notice more than, as people say, the pints of the sea.'

'And of all this he is not even aware that he does not know it; but in reality only his body lies and sojourns in the city, while he himself, as Pindar says, flies beneath the earth and above the heaven, studying the stars, and searching out the whole of nature in every direction.'

Again, to the Lord's saying, 'Let your yes be yes, and your no, no,' the following must be compared:

'But it is in no way lawful for me either to concede a falsehood or to suppress the truth.'

And with the prohibition against swearing agrees this passage in the tenth book of the Laws:

'Let both praise and oath concerning everything be absent.'

And in general, Pythagoras and Socrates and Plato, when they say that they hear the voice of God, are contemplating precisely how the structure of the universe has come to be by God and is held together without ceasing; for they have heard Moses saying, 'He said, and it came to pass,' setting forth that the word of God is a deed.

And standing upon the account of man's formation out of dust, the philosophers, on every occasion, proclaim the body to be earthy.

And Homer does not hesitate to set down, by way of a curse, the words:

'But may you all become water and earth' — just as Isaiah says, 'and trample them down like clay.'

And Callimachus writes explicitly:

'That was the year in which the winged creature, and the creature of the sea, and the four-footed beast spoke in the same way as the Promethean clay.'

And again the same author says, 'If Prometheus fashioned you, and you were made of no other clay'; and Hesiod, concerning Pandora, says, 'And he bade renowned Hephaestus, as quickly as possible, mix earth with water, and put into it a human voice and mind.'

The Stoics, then, define nature as an artistic fire proceeding methodically toward generation.

And God and his Word are allegorized by Scripture as fire and light.

But what of this? Does not Homer too, paraphrasing the separation of the water from the earth and the visible revealing of the dry land...

...say concerning Tethys and Oceanus:

'For already for a long time they have refrained from each other's bed and love.' Again, the most learned among the Greeks also attribute omnipotence in all things to God — Epicharmus, for instance (who was a Pythagorean), saying:

'This you must know: he himself is our overseer, and nothing is impossible for God.' And the lyric poet says:

'For God it is possible to raise up unsullied light out of black night, and to shroud in dark cloud the pure gleam of day' (he who alone is able, he says, to make night while day is present — this one is God); and Aratus, in the work entitled Phaenomena, having said, 'Let us begin from Zeus, whom, men, let us never leave unspoken,' goes on:

'Full of Zeus are all the streets, and all the marketplaces of men; full is the sea and the harbors;'

'and in every way we all have need of Zeus.'

'For we are also his offspring,' as it were his handiwork; 'and gently he gives men favorable signs, and rouses the peoples to their labors.'

'For he himself fixed these signs in heaven, distinguishing the stars.'

'And he devised, for the year, which stars should best indicate to men the fixed seasons, that all things might grow in due and settled order.'

'And him they always propitiate first and last.'

'Hail, Father, great wonder, great benefit to men.'

And before him, Homer, in describing the shield fashioned by Hephaestus, forming a world after the manner of Moses, says: 'On it he wrought the earth, and the heaven, and the sea, and all the constellations with which the heaven is crowned.'

For the Zeus who is celebrated in poems and in prose writings refers, in his very concept, to God.

Democritus, moreover, writes almost, so to speak, in plain daylight, that there are some few men who, raising their hands toward what we Greeks now call the air, say:

'...and he takes away, and this one is king of all things.'

But more mystically, Pindar the Boeotian, inasmuch as he was a Pythagorean, hands down the teaching: 'One is the race of men, one the race of gods; from one mother do we both draw breath' — namely, matter — and he also hands down one craftsman of these, whom he calls 'father, most excellent artificer,' the one who has granted advancement toward divinity according to merit.

This man plainly appears, in his letter to Erastus and Coriscus, to be setting forth — I know not how — Father and Son from the Hebrew Scriptures, exhorting them, word for word, as follows:

swearing, with an earnestness not without art, and with the play that is the sister of earnestness—swearing by the God who is the cause of all things, and the father of the ruling and causing One, the Lord; whom, if you philosophize rightly, you shall know.

And the discourse in the Timaeus calls the Demiurge 'father,' speaking somewhat as follows:

Gods, offspring of gods, of whom I am father and maker...of the works.

So that also when he says concerning the King of all: 'All things are for his sake, and he is the cause of all good things; the second is concerned with the second things, and the third with the third things'—I, at least, understand this to signify nothing else than the Holy Trinity.

For the third is the Holy Spirit, and the Son is second, through whom all things came to be according to the will of the Father.

The same Plato, in the tenth book of the Republic, mentions Er, son of Armenius, by race a Pamphylian, who is Zoroaster.

At any rate, Zoroaster himself writes:

These things I, Zoroaster son of Armenius, by race a Pamphylian, have set down in writing, having died in war, recording whatever I learned from the gods when I came to be in Hades.

Plato says that this Zoroaster, having lain twelve days upon the funeral pyre, came back to life.

Perhaps he is hinting at the resurrection, or perhaps at this: that for souls the way to their ascension comes about through the twelve signs of the zodiac; while he himself also says that the descent into birth happens by the very same path.

In this way one must also suppose that the labors of Heracles came to be twelve in number, after which the soul obtains release from this whole world.

Nor do I pass over Empedocles, who, in a naturalistic manner, likewise mentions the restoration of all things, as though there would one day be a transformation into the substance of fire.

Most clearly of all holds this opinion Heraclitus of Ephesus, who judged that one sort of world is eternal, but another sort perishable, knowing that the world according to its ordered arrangement is not other than that eternal world, but is that same world existing in a certain state.

But that he knew the world constituted from all substance, in its own peculiar quality, to be eternal, he makes clear when he speaks thus:

This ordered universe, the same for all, none of the gods nor of men made; but it always was, and is, and shall be: an ever-living fire, kindled in measures and extinguished in measures.

But that he also held it to be both generated and perishable, the following words show:

The turnings of fire: first, sea; and of sea, half is earth, half is fiery storm—for he means, potentially, that fire, by the directing Word and God of all things, is turned through air into moisture, as it were the seed of the ordered arrangement, which he calls 'sea.'

And from this, in turn, come to be earth and heaven and the things contained within them.

But how it is again taken up and consumed by fire, he makes clear through the following:

Sea is dispersed and measured out into the same proportion as it was before it became earth.

And likewise the same holds true concerning the other elements.

Similar to this, the most distinguished of the Stoics also teach, discoursing about the conflagration and the administration of the world, and about the world's own peculiar quality and man's, and about the continuance of our souls.

Again, Plato, in the seventh book of the Republic, has called the day here 'nocturnal' (because, I suppose, of the rulers of this darkness), and has, in agreement with Heraclitus, called the soul's descent into the body 'sleep and death.'

And did not the Spirit, through David, foretell this very thing concerning the Savior, saying:

I lay down and slept;

I awoke, because the Lord will sustain me.

Immediately the Savior himself likewise commands:

Watch—that is, practice living rightly and endeavor to separate the soul from the body.

Plato, too, in the tenth book of the Republic, divines the Lord's Day through the following words:

And when seven days had passed for each of those in the meadow, they must rise up from there and on the eighth day set out on their journey, arriving on the fourth day.

By 'meadow,' then, one must understand the sphere of the fixed stars, as a gentle and pleasant region and the abode of the holy; and by 'seven days,' each of the seven motions, and the whole laboring art hastening toward the end of rest.

And the journey after the wandering stars leads up to heaven, that is, to the eighth motion and day.

And he says the souls depart on the fourth day, signifying the journey through the four elements.

But not only the Hebrews but the Greeks as well know the seventh day to be holy, according to which the whole cosmos revolves, of all things that are engendered and that grow.

Hesiod, then, speaks thus concerning it:

First, the fourth, and the seventh—a holy day;

and again on the seventh, the bright light of the sun;

then on the seventh the holy day came down;

it was the seventh day, and on it all things were completed;

and on the seventh dawn we left the stream from Acheron.

And truly Callimachus the poet also writes:

and on the seventh dawn all things were accomplished for him;

the seventh is among good things, and the seventh is a birthday;

the seventh is among the first, and the seventh is perfect.

and seven things altogether were wrought in the starry heaven, appearing in cycles as the years came round.

But the elegies of Solon, too, exceedingly extol the number seven as divine.

What then? Is it not similar to what Scripture says, 'let us take away the righteous man from among us, for he is troublesome to us,' when Plato, all but prophesying the saving dispensation, says the following in the second book of the Republic:

Being thus disposed, the righteous man will be scourged, tortured, bound; his eyes will be put out; and at last, having suffered every evil, he will be crucified.

And Antisthenes the Socratic, paraphrasing that prophetic utterance, 'To whom have you likened me? says the Lord,' says that God is like no one:

Wherefore no one is able fully to learn him from any image.

And Xenophon the Athenian says similar things, word for word:

He, then, who shakes and steadies all things, is manifest as being someone great and powerful;

but what form he is like remains unseen.

Nor indeed does even the sun, though it seems to be all-radiant, allow itself to be looked upon; but if anyone gazes at it shamelessly, it takes away his sight.

For what flesh is able with its eyes to see the heavenly and true, immortal God, who dwells in the vault of heaven? Nor indeed are men, being mortal by birth, able to stand against the sun's very rays—thus the Sibyl foretold.

Well indeed also does Xenophanes of Colophon, teaching that God is one and incorporeal, add:

One God, greatest among gods and men, in no way like mortals either in body or in thought.

But mortals suppose that gods are begotten, and that they have clothing, voice, and body like their own.

But if oxen or lions had hands, so as to draw with their hands and accomplish works as men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and would make their bodies of just the same shape as each of them themselves possessed.

Let us then hear again the lyric poet Bacchylides speaking concerning the divine:

They are untamed by unseemly diseases, and unharmed, in nothing like men.

And when Cleanthes the Stoic, in a certain poem concerning God, had written the following:

You ask me what the good is like? Listen, then:

orderly, just, holy, pious, master of itself, useful, beautiful, fitting, austere, straightforward, ever profitable, fearless, free from grief, advantageous, free from pain, beneficial, well-pleasing, secure, dear, honored, consistent, of good repute, without vanity, careful, gentle, intense, enduring, blameless, ever-abiding.

Reproaching the idolatry of the many, he adds:

Ignoble is everyone who looks to popular opinion, as though he would obtain some good thing from it.

No longer, then, must one form opinions about the divine according to the opinion of the many.

'For I do not think that Zeus, secretly counterfeiting the shape of a deceiving light, came to your bed like a man'—thus Amphion speaks to Antiope.

And Sophocles writes in plain terms:

For Zeus indeed took this man's mother as his wife—not in golden form, nor clad in swan's plumage, as when he made the Pleuronian maiden conceive—but as a whole and entire man.

Then, having stealthily come upon her, he went on to say:

And swiftly the adulterer took his stand upon the steps of the bridal chamber.

Concerning which matters he narrates the licentiousness of the Zeus fashioned in myth still more openly, somewhat as follows:

But he, having touched neither feast nor water for the washing of hands, went to the bed, his heart gnawed with longing;

and throughout that whole night he coupled in passion.

Let these things, then, be left to the follies of the theaters;

but Heraclitus plainly says: 'Though this Word ever is, men prove uncomprehending, both before they hear it and once they have heard it for the first time.'

And the lyric poet Melanippides, in his song, says:

'Hear me, O Father, wonder of mortals, ruler of the ever-living soul.'

And Parmenides the great, as Plato says in the Sophist, writes somewhat thus concerning the divine:

'many signs indeed, that being ungenerated it is also imperishable, whole, unique of its kind, unshaken, and ungenerated.'

But Hesiod too—for he himself says that he is king and lord of all the immortals:

'and no other has ever contended for your power.'

Indeed, tragedy too, drawing men away from idols, teaches them to look up to heaven.

Sophocles, as Hecataeus, who compiled the histories in his work Concerning Abraham and the Egyptians, says, cries out plainly upon the stage:

'One in very truth, one is God, who made heaven and the vast earth, and the bright swell of the sea, and the might of the winds;'

'but we mortals, many of us erring in heart, have set up, as a solace for our sufferings, images of the gods made of stone, or figures wrought of bronze or gold or ivory;'

'and offering these sacrifices and wretched festal rites, we suppose that thus we act piously.'

And Euripides, in a tragedy on the same stage, says: 'Do you see this boundless ether stretching on high, and the earth encircling it in moist embrace? Deem this to be Zeus, consider this to be God.'

And in the drama Pirithous, the same poet also writes tragically as follows:

'You, the self-existent one, who in the ethereal whirl have entwined the nature of all things, around whom light, and around whom murky night of shifting hues, and the countless throng of stars, dance in endless round.'

For here he has called the self-existent one the creating Mind, while what follows is applied to the cosmos, in which are also the oppositions of light... and darkness.

And Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, speaks very solemnly concerning God:

'Zeus is the ether, Zeus is the earth, Zeus is the heaven;'

'Zeus indeed is all things, and whatever is higher than these.'

I know too that Plato bears additional witness to Heraclitus, who writes:

'The one, the only wise, is both unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus;'

'and it is law to obey the counsel of the One.'

And if you should wish to trace back that saying, 'He who has ears to hear, let him hear,' you would find it somewhat thus expressed by the Ephesian:

'The uncomprehending, though they have heard, are like the deaf;

the proverb bears them witness: being present, they are absent.' ... But do you desire, in plain terms, to hear even from the Greeks of one single first principle? Timaeus of Locri, in his treatise on nature, will bear me witness word for word, thus:

'There is one first principle of all things, ungenerated;'

'for if it had come into being, it would no longer be a first principle, but rather that from which the first principle came into being.'

For from thence flowed the true doctrine;

'Hear, O Israel,' he says, 'the Lord your God is one, and him alone shall you serve.'

'This one, behold, stands manifest and unerring to all,' as the Sibyl says.

Now Homer too appears, through these words, to signify father and son, as having chanced upon a well-aimed divination, when he says:

'If indeed no one does you violence, being alone as you are, yet there is no way to escape the sickness sent by great Zeus;'

'for the Cyclopes care nothing for aegis-bearing Zeus.'

Orpheus, treating of the very matter before us, has said:

'Son of great Zeus, father of aegis-bearing Zeus;'

And Xenocrates of Chalcedon, calling the one the highest Zeus, and the other the lowest... leaves an implication of father and son.

And, most paradoxical of all, Homer appears to have knowledge of the divine, even while introducing the gods as subject to human passions:

him whom not even in this respect does Epicurus revere.

'Why, son of Peleus, do you pursue me with swift feet, being yourself a mortal, pursuing an immortal god? Have you not yet perceived that I am a god?'

For he has shown that the divine cannot be seized or comprehended by a mortal, neither with feet... nor with hands, nor with eyes, nor at all with the body.

'To whom have you likened the Lord? Or with what likeness have you compared him?' says the Scripture.

'Has a craftsman made an image, or has a goldsmith, having smelted gold, overlaid it with gold?' and what follows.

And the comic poet Epicharmus speaks clearly concerning the Word/Reason in his Republic, somewhat as follows:

'Human life has very great need of reckoning and number;'

'and we live by number and reckoning;'

'Reason governs men, and preserves them in due measure;'

'then, if man has reckoning, there is also a divine Word.'

'The one indeed exists by nature in man, concerning the vicissitudes of life;'

'but the other, the divine Word, accompanies every art, itself ever teaching men what it is expedient to do;'

'for it was not man who discovered art;'

'but the reason of man has its nature derived from the divine Word.'

Indeed, when the Spirit cries out through Isaiah, 'What is the multitude of your sacrifices to me?' says the Lord:

'I am full of whole burnt offerings of rams, and I do not desire the fat of lambs and the blood of bulls,' and, a little after, adding: 'Wash yourselves, become clean, remove your wickednesses from your souls,' and what follows—Menander the comic poet writes in these very words:

'But if anyone, O Pamphilus, offering a sacrifice—some multitude of bulls or goats, or, by Zeus, other such things, or fashioned ornaments, having made golden or purple robes, or figurines of ivory or emerald—supposes that by this he renders God well-disposed, that man has gone astray and possesses a shallow mind;'