Fragments of the One Truth

That is why the Savior took the bread and first spoke and blessed it; then he broke it and handed it to us, so that we might eat it as reason directs, and so that, knowing the Scriptures, we might walk in obedience. People whose speech is evil are no better than people whose conduct is evil. Slander is the sword’s errand-boy, and abuse inflicts real pain; and out of both of these come the disasters of life — that is what evil speech does. In the same way, people who are given to speaking well are close neighbors to people who get good done. Speech refreshes the soul and draws it toward what is noble, and fortunate is the man who has the use of both his hands. [a]

So the man who can act well is not to be run down by the man who can speak well, and the man who can speak well is not to be belittled by the man who can act. Let each do what he is naturally fitted for. What the one displays as actually done, the other puts into words, clearing the road, as it were, for good conduct and leading his hearers to practice it. For there is a word that saves, as there is a work that saves. Righteousness, then, is not put together without speech. And just as receiving good is abolished if we abolish doing good, so obedience and faith are abolished when we take with us neither the command nor anyone to explain the command.

As things are, words and deeds do us good back and forth, each answering the other. But the art of wrangling and sophistry has to be thrown out altogether. The sophists’ sentences do not merely bewitch and take in the crowd; sometimes they force through a Cadmean victory. For truest of all is that psalm: “The righteous man will live to the end, for he will not see decay, when he sees the wise dying.” And whom does it call wise? Listen to the Wisdom of Jesus: “Wisdom is not the knowledge of evil.” What it means by that is whatever the arts of speaking and arguing have invented. “So you will look for wisdom among the wicked and not find it.” And if you ask again what sort of wisdom this is, you are told, “The mouth of the righteous man will distill wisdom.” In the same way, alongside the truth, the art of sophistry too goes by the name of wisdom.

My own purpose — and I think I have reason for it — is to live according to the Word and to understand what has been revealed, never to affect eloquence, but to be content with simply pointing at what I mean. By what term the thing I want to present gets shown, I do not care. For I know well that the best thing is to be saved and to help those who want to be saved, and not to compose paltry sentences like trinkets. As the Pythagorean says in Plato’s Statesman: “If you guard against fussing over terms, you will be the richer in wisdom by the time you are old.” And in the Theaetetus you will find it again: “Being careless about names and expressions, and not scrutinizing them closely, is for the most part not vulgar or beneath a free man, but rather the opposite — and it is sometimes necessary.” Scripture has said the same thing as briefly as it can be said: “Do not busy yourself much about words.”

Expression is the clothing on a body; the substance is the flesh and the sinews. So we must not care more for the clothes than for the body’s health. A man who has taken up the true life must cultivate not only a plain way of living but a style of speech with nothing superfluous or fussy about it — that is, if we are going to give up luxury as treacherous and dissolute. The old Spartans renounced perfumed oil and purple cloth, and were right to think of them and to call them treacherous garments and treacherous ointments. Food is not rightly prepared where there is more seasoning in it than nourishment, and speech is not elegant when it can please its hearers rather than do them good. Pythagoras urges us to find the Muses more delightful than the Sirens, teaching us to cultivate wisdom apart from pleasure and exposing the other way of drawing the soul as a fraud. For sailing past the Sirens, one man had strength enough; for answering the Sphinx, another had — or, if you like, not even one.

So we ought never, out of a craving for empty glory, to make our phylacteries broad. It is enough for the knower if only one hearer is found for him. Listen, then, to Pindar of Boeotia, who writes:

So the blessed apostle presses us, very fittingly and very urgently, “not to fight about words, which does no good and only overturns the hearers, but to keep away from godless empty chatter; for it will lead on to more and more ungodliness, and their word will spread like gangrene.”

So, then: “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God,” and as for the wise, “the Lord knows their thoughts, that they are empty.” Let no one boast, then, over standing out in human thought. It is well written in Jeremiah: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, and let not the strong man boast in his strength, and let not the rich man boast in his riches; but let the one who boasts boast in this: that he understands and knows that I am the Lord, who does mercy and judgment and righteousness on the earth. For in these is my delight, says the Lord.” [l]

And the apostle says, “that we should trust not in ourselves but in God, who raises the dead, who rescued us from so great a death — so that your faith would not rest in human wisdom but in God’s power.” “The spiritual man judges everything, and is himself judged by no one.” I hear these words of his too: “I say this so that no one may talk you out of it with persuasive words,” and, “so that no one may come in and carry you off as plunder.” And again: “See that no one carries you off as plunder through philosophy and empty deceit, following human tradition, following the elements of the world and not following Christ.” He is not branding all philosophy, but the Epicurean kind — which Paul mentions in the Acts of the Apostles — the philosophy that does away with providence and makes a god of pleasure; and with it any other philosophy that honors the elements but sets over them no cause to make them work, and never grasps the Creator.

The Stoics too, whom he also mentions, are wrong to say that the Deity is a body and runs through the vilest matter. The conjuring tricks of logic are what he calls “human tradition.” That is why he adds, “Avoid youthful questions.” Quarrels of that sort belong to boys; and as Plato the philosopher says, “virtue is no lover of boys.” Our contest, as Gorgias of Leontini has it, calls for two virtues — daring and wisdom: daring to face the danger, wisdom to make out the riddle. For the Word, like the herald’s call at the Olympic games, summons whoever is willing, and crowns whoever can hold his ground where the truth is concerned. And in fact the Word does not want the man who has believed to be idle. He says, “Seek, and you will find.” But seeking ends in finding: it drives out the empty trifling and approves the contemplation that confirms our faith.

“And I say this so that no one may talk you out of it with persuasive words,” says the apostle — plainly of a man who has learned to tell apart what is said to him and has been trained to meet objections. “So then, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in him, rooted and built up in him and made firm in the faith.” Now what makes a man firm in the faith is being persuaded. “See that no one carries off your faith in Christ through philosophy and empty deceit” — the philosophy that does away with providence — “following human tradition.” For the philosophy that agrees with the divine tradition establishes providence and confirms it; and once providence is done away with, the Savior’s whole plan looks like a myth, while we are carried along “following the elements of the world and not following Christ.” For the teaching that agrees with Christ gives the place of God to the Creator, traces providence down into particular events, knows that the nature of the elements can be changed and made to produce, and teaches that we should aim at climbing up to the power that makes a man like God, and should prefer God’s own plan, which holds first place and stands above all training.

The elements get worshipped: the air by Diogenes, the water by Thales, the fire by Hippasus — and so do atoms, by the men who make them the first principles of things and lay claim to the name of philosophers, wretched creatures given over to pleasure. “And this is my prayer,” says the apostle, “that your love may overflow more and more, in knowledge and in all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent.” “When we were children,” says the same apostle, “we were held in slavery under the elements of the world. And the child, though he is the heir, is no different from a slave until the time his father set.” Philosophers, then, are children, unless Christ has made men of them. “For if the son of the slave woman is not to inherit along with the son of the free woman” — still, he is Abraham’s offspring, though not by promise, and receives what belongs to him as a free gift. “But solid food belongs to grown men, whose faculties have been trained by practice to tell good from evil.” “For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness; he is an infant” — not yet acquainted with the word by which he has believed and by which he acts, and not able to give an account of it out of himself. “Test everything,” the apostle says, “and hold on to what is good,” speaking to spiritual men, who judge what is said by the truth, whether a thing merely looks true or really holds to the truth.

“The man who is not corrected by discipline goes astray, and blows and rebukes give the discipline of wisdom” — the rebukes meant being plainly the ones given in love. “For an upright heart looks for knowledge.” “The one who seeks the Lord will find knowledge along with righteousness, and those who have sought it rightly have found peace.” “And I will find out,” it says, “not the talk of these men who are puffed up, but the power.” Rebuking men who look wise and think themselves wise but in reality are not, he writes, “For the kingdom of God is not in talk.” It does not stand in what is untrue but merely plausible as opinion goes; he said “in power,” because truth alone has power. And again: “If anyone thinks he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.” For truth is never mere opinion. But the “notion of knowledge puffs up” and fills a man with pride, while “love builds up,” and love deals not in notions but in truth. That is why it says, “If anyone loves, he is known.”

But since this handed-down teaching is not published only for the man who takes in the greatness of the word, the wisdom that was spoken, the wisdom the Son of God taught, has to be kept hidden in a mystery. That is why the prophet Isaiah had his tongue purified with fire, so that he could tell the vision. And we must purify not the tongue only but the ears as well, if we mean to share in the truth. [aa]

These were the things standing in the way of my writing. Even now I am afraid, as the saying goes, of “throwing the pearls before pigs, in case they trample them underfoot and turn and tear us apart.” It is hard to set out the really pure and transparent words about the true light in front of swinish, untrained hearers. To the crowd, hardly anything they could hear would sound more ridiculous than these things; and to men of noble nature, hardly any subject is more admirable or more rousing. “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.” Wise men, though, do not say out loud what they reason over in council.

But the Lord says, “What you hear in the ear, proclaim on the housetops.” He is telling them to take in the hidden traditions of the true knowledge and to expound them high up and in plain view; and, as we have heard it in the ear, so to hand it on to those who ought to have it. He is not ordering us to pass on to everyone without distinction what is said to those people in parables. But there is only an outline in these notes of mine. The truth is sown in them thinly and scattered wide, so that it slips past the people who pick up seeds like jackdaws; and when the seeds find a good farmer, each of them will sprout and bring up grain.

Truth is one — falsehood has ten thousand side roads. And just as the Bacchantes tore Pentheus limb from limb, so the schools of philosophy, barbarian and Greek alike, have done with the truth: each of them boasts that the portion which fell to it is the whole. But all of them, in my opinion, are lit by the dawning of the Light. So let everyone who has reached after the truth, Greeks and barbarians alike — those who hold no small share of it and those who hold any share at all — bring out whatever they have of the word of truth. [af]

Eternity, for instance, holds out in a single instant the future and the present, and the past of time as well. But truth is far stronger than unlimited duration: it can gather in its own seeds, even when they have fallen on foreign soil. For we will find that a great many of the teachings held by those schools which have not gone entirely out of their senses, and have not been cut out of the order of nature by cutting off Christ — as the women in the story dismembered the man — agree in their origin and with the truth as a whole, unlike as they look to one another. They come together into one, either as a part, or a species, or a genus. The top note differs from the bottom note, but both make one harmony. In numbers, an even number differs from an odd one, but both belong to arithmetic; and it is the same with shape — the circle and the triangle and the square, and whatever other figures differ from one another. In the whole universe, too, all the parts, different as they are from each other, keep their relation to the whole.

So barbarian and Greek philosophy alike have torn off a fragment of the eternal truth — not from the mythology of Dionysus, but from the theology of the ever-living Word. And whoever brings the separated pieces back together and makes them one will look on the perfect Word, the truth, without danger; you may be sure of that. That is why it is written in Ecclesiastes: “And I added wisdom beyond all who were before me in Jerusalem, and my heart saw many things; and besides that, I came to know wisdom and knowledge, parables and understanding. And this too is a choosing of the spirit, because in much wisdom is much knowledge.” The man at home in every kind of wisdom will be a knower above all others. And it is written, “The abundance of the knowledge of wisdom will give life to the man who has it.”

And what has been said is confirmed still more plainly by this saying: “All things are plain to those who understand” — all things, both Greek and barbarian; but neither the one nor the other is all of them. “They are straight to those who want to receive understanding. Take instruction rather than silver, and knowledge rather than tested gold” — and prefer good sense to pure gold as well — “for wisdom is better than precious stones, and nothing you set store by is worth as much as she is.”