Moses the Living Law

Plato the philosopher, helped in his lawgiving by the books of Moses, found fault with the constitution of Minos and with that of Lycurgus, since these aimed at courage and nothing else. He praised as more fitting the constitution that expresses some one thing and directs by one command. For he says that we ought to pursue wisdom with strength and dignity and good sense, holding the same opinions unchangeably about the same things, with our eyes on the dignity of heaven. And so he interprets what stands in the law, which tells us to look to one God and to act justly. Of politics, he says, there are two kinds: the department of law, and politics strictly so called. He refers to the Creator as the Statesman, in the highest sense of that word, in the book he named after him; and men who lead an active and just life joined to contemplation he calls statesmen. The department of politics that is called “law” he divides into greatness of soul in public administration and good order in private life, which he calls orderliness, and into harmony and self-mastery, which show themselves when rulers suit their subjects and subjects obey their rulers. This is the very result the system of Moses works so hard to bring about. Further, Plato holds — with the help he had — that the department of law rests on how things come to be, and the department of politics on friendship and agreement. That is why he set beside the Laws the philosopher of the Epinomis, who knew the whole course of coming-to-be, which runs by way of the planets; and why he attached to the Republic the other philosopher, Timaeus, an astronomer and a student of the movements of the stars and of their sympathy and fellowship with one another. In my opinion, then, the end both of the statesman and of the man who lives by law is contemplation. [a]

So public affairs must be rightly managed — but to pursue wisdom is best. For a wise man will live with all his strength bent on knowledge, steering his life by good deeds, despising their opposite, and following the pursuits that make for truth. And law is not what a law decides (what is seen is not the seeing), nor is it every opinion — certainly not a bad one. Law is the good opinion; and what is good is what is true; and what is true is what finds true being and reaches it. As Moses says, “The One who is has sent me.” In line with this — that is, with good opinion — some have called law right reason, which commands what is to be done and forbids what is not.

That is why the law was rightly said to have been given through Moses: it is a rule of what is right and what is wrong. And we may accurately call it the divine ordinance, since it was given by God through Moses. It leads, accordingly, to what is divine. Paul says: “The law was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise was made.” Then, as if explaining his meaning, he adds: “But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up” — plainly through fear, because of sins — “for the faith that was going to be revealed; so that the law was our instructor to bring us to Christ, so that we might be counted righteous by faith.” [e]

The true lawgiver is the one who assigns to each part of the soul what suits it and suits its work. Now Moses, to say it all in a word, was a living law, governed by the kind Word. So he provided a good constitution, which is the right training of people who live together. He also handled the administration of justice — the branch of knowledge that deals with correcting wrongdoers in the interest of justice. Alongside it stands the skill of dealing with punishments, which is a knowledge of the right measure to keep in punishing. And punishment, precisely as punishment, is the correcting of the soul. In short, the whole system of Moses is fitted for training men who are capable of becoming good and noble, and for hunting such men out; and this is the art of command. And the wisdom that can deal rightly with those who have been caught by the Word is the wisdom of the lawgiver. For it belongs to this wisdom, the most kingly of all, to possess and to use —

So it is the wise man alone whom the philosophers proclaim king, lawgiver, general, just, holy, loved by God. And if we find these qualities in Moses, as the Scriptures themselves show, then we may say with complete confidence that Moses is truly wise. Just as we say it belongs to the shepherd’s craft to care for the sheep — for “the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” — so we shall say that lawgiving, since it presides over and cares for the flock of human beings, establishes their virtue by fanning into flame whatever good there is in humanity. And if the flock spoken of in figure as the Lord’s is nothing but a flock of human beings, then he himself is the good Shepherd and Lawgiver of the one flock, the flock “of the sheep who listen to him” — the one who cares for them, “seeking” and finding, by the law and by the word, “what was lost.” For the law is in truth spiritual, and it leads to happiness; and what has come about through the Holy Spirit is spiritual. And a man is truly a lawgiver who not only announces what is good and noble but understands it. The law of this man who has knowledge is the saving command — or rather, the law is the command of knowledge. For the Word is “the power and the wisdom of God.” Again, the one who expounds the laws is the same one through whom the law was given: the first expounder of the divine commands, the only Son, who unveiled the Father’s bosom. Those, then, who obey the law, since they have some knowledge of him, cannot disbelieve or be ignorant of the truth. But those who disbelieve, and who have shown their distaste for taking up the works of the law — whoever else may know the truth, these men certainly confess that they do not.

What, then, is the unbelief of the Greeks? Is it not their unwillingness to believe the truth that says the law was given by God through Moses — while in their own writers they pay Moses honor? They tell how Minos received his laws from Zeus over nine years, going up again and again to the cave of Zeus; and Plato and Aristotle and Ephorus write that Lycurgus was trained in lawgiving by his constant visits to Apollo at Delphi. Chamaeleon of Heraclea, in his book On Drunkenness, and Aristotle in The Constitution of the Locrians mention that Zaleucus the Locrian received his laws from Athena. But those who raise the credit of Greek lawgiving as high as they can by tracing it back to a divine source — on the model of Moses’s prophecy — are out of their senses, since they will not acknowledge the truth, or the original of the story they tell.

So let no one run the law down as though, because of its penalty, it were not beautiful and good. Is the man who drives disease out of the body to be counted a benefactor, and the man who tries to free the soul from wickedness not to be counted a friend all the more, as the soul is a more precious thing than the body? Besides, for the sake of the body’s health we submit to cuttings and cauterizings and doses of medicine, and the man who administers them is called savior and healer — even when he cuts a limb away, not out of grudge or ill will toward the patient, but because the rules of his art require it, so that the sound parts may not perish along with the rotten. And nobody charges the doctor’s art with wickedness. Shall we not likewise submit, for the soul’s sake, to exile or punishment or chains, if only we may come out of unrighteousness into righteousness? [k]

For the law, in its care for those who obey it, trains them up toward reverence for God, prescribes what is to be done, and holds each man back from sins, laying penalties even on the smaller ones. But when it sees anyone in such a state that he looks incurable, racing to the last stage of wickedness, then in its care for the rest, so that they are not ruined by him, it condemns such a man to death — just as if it were cutting a part away from the whole body — as the course that best serves health. “When we are judged by the Lord,” says the apostle, “we are disciplined, so that we may not be condemned along with the world.” For the prophet had said earlier, “The Lord disciplined me hard, but he did not hand me over to death.” “In order to teach you his righteousness,” it says, “he disciplined you and tested you and made you hunger and thirst in the desert land, so that all his statutes and his judgments might be known in your heart, as I command you today; and so that you might know in your heart that, just as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God will discipline you.” And to show that an example corrects, he says exactly to the point: “A shrewd man, seeing the wicked punished, is himself sharply disciplined; for the fear of the Lord is the source of wisdom.”

But it is the highest and most perfect good when a man is able to lead someone back from the practice of evil to virtue and doing well — which is the very work of the law. So when a man falls into some incurable evil — when he is taken over, say, by injustice or by greed — it will be for his own good if he is put to death. For the law does good. It can make some men righteous out of unrighteous, if only they will give it a hearing, and it releases others from the evils they are in; and those who have chosen to live with self-mastery and justice it conducts to immortality. To know the law is the mark of a good disposition. And again: “Wicked men do not understand the law, but those who seek the Lord will have understanding in all that is good.”

It is certainly necessary that the providence which manages everything be both sovereign and good, since it is the power of both together that dispenses salvation — the one correcting by punishment, as sovereign; the other showing kindness by doing good, as a benefactor. It is in your own power not to be a son of disobedience, but to pass out of darkness into life, and, lending your ear to wisdom, to be at first God’s slave under the law and then to become his faithful household servant, fearing the Lord God. And if a man climbs higher, he is enrolled among the sons. But when “love covers a multitude of sins,” by the fulfilling of the blessed hope, then we may welcome such a man as one who has been made rich in love and received into the chosen adoption, which is called “beloved of God,” while he chants the prayer that says, “Let the Lord be my God.”

The apostle showed how much good the law does in the passage about the Jews, where he writes: “Look, you are called a Jew, and you rest on the law, and you boast in God, and you know his will, and you approve the things that are excellent because you are instructed out of the law; and you are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants, having in the law the outward form of knowledge and of truth.” For it is admitted that this is the law’s power, even though men whose conduct does not follow the law make a false show of living in it. “Blessed is the man who has found wisdom, and the mortal who has seen understanding; for out of its mouth” — Wisdom’s mouth, plainly — “comes righteousness, and it carries law and mercy on its tongue.” For both the law and the good news are the working of one Lord, who is “the power and wisdom of God”; and the terror the law breeds is merciful and is meant for salvation. “Do not let mercy and faith and truth fail you; hang them around your neck.” Prophecy, like Paul, reproaches the people for not understanding the law: “Ruin and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known.” “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” “Claiming to be wise, they became fools.” “And we know that the law is good, if a man uses it lawfully.” “Wanting to be teachers of the law, they understand,” says the apostle, “neither what they are saying nor the things about which they make their assertions.” “Now the aim of the command is love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith.”

The philosophy of Moses is accordingly divided into four parts: the historical part, and the part properly called the lawgiving part — these two belong to a treatise on ethics; third, the part that deals with sacrifice, which belongs to the study of nature; and fourth, above all the rest, the part that deals with God, the “vision,” which Plato assigns to the truly great mysteries. This kind Aristotle calls metaphysics. [t]

Dialectic, according to Plato — as he says in the Statesman — is a science given to finding the explanation of things. The wise man is to acquire it, not so as to say or do anything of the sort we find among men (as the dialecticians do who busy themselves with sophistry), but so as to be able, as far as he can, to say and do what pleases God. True dialectic, being philosophy mixed with truth, examines things and tests forces and powers, and so climbs by degrees toward the most excellent being of all, and ventures beyond it to the God of the universe. It professes knowledge not of mortal affairs but of things divine and heavenly, and out of it follows a fitting practice in word and deed, even in human affairs. Rightly, then, the Scripture urges us, wanting to make us dialecticians of this kind: “Be skillful money-changers” — rejecting some things and holding on to what is good. For this true dialectic is the science that takes apart the objects of thought and displays, by itself and in the abstract, the individual thing that underlies whatever exists; or it is the power of dividing things into kinds, going down to their most particular properties, and setting each individual object before us to be contemplated simply as what it is.

That is why it alone leads to true wisdom, which is the divine power dealing with the knowledge of the things that are, as things that are; it grasps what is perfect and is set free from every passion. And this does not happen apart from the Savior, who by the divine word draws off the gloom of ignorance that came from bad training and had spread over the eye of the soul, and who gives the best of gifts —

He is the one who truly shows us how we are to know ourselves. He is the one who reveals the Father of the universe to whomever he wills, and as far as human nature can take him in. “For no one knows the Son except the Father, nor the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” Rightly, then, the apostle says that he came to know the mystery by revelation: “As I wrote before in a few words, as far as you are able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ.” “As far as you are able,” he said — for he knew that some had received milk only, and not yet solid food, nor even milk by itself. The sense of the law is to be taken in three ways: as showing a symbol, or as laying down a rule for right conduct, or as speaking a prophecy. But I know well that it takes men who are full-grown to distinguish these and to declare them. For the whole of Scripture is not, in its meaning, one single Myconos, as the proverb has it; and men who hunt for the connection running through the divine teaching must come at it with the reasoning faculty at its most perfect.

So the Egyptian priest in Plato put it most beautifully: “Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children. There is not one old opinion in your souls, handed down by tradition out of antiquity, and not one of the Greeks is an old man.” By “old,” I take it, he means those who know what belongs to the more remote past — that is, our own literature; and by “young,” those who deal with what is more recent and has become the Greeks’ subject of study, things of yesterday and of recent date, treated as though they were old and ancient. So he added, “and no study hoary with age.” For we, in our barbarian fashion, deal in homely and rough images, and so men whose minds are rightly formed come to the interpretation with no artifice at all. Of the Greeks he says that their opinions “differ little from myths,” for neither childish fables nor the stories that pass among children are fit to listen to. And he called the myths themselves “children,” as though they were the offspring of Greeks who were wise in their own conceit and had little insight; while by “the hoary studies” he meant the truth held by the barbarians, dating from the highest antiquity. Against that phrase he set “the child’s tale,” faulting the mythical character of what the moderns attempt as having, like children, nothing of age in it, and calling both together — their fables and their speeches — childish. [z]

In a way worthy of God, then, the power that spoke to Hermas by revelation said, “The visions and the revelations are for the double-minded, who question in their hearts whether these things are so or not.” In the same way, proofs drawn from the resources of learning strengthen and confirm and settle demonstrative reasoning, in so far as men’s minds are in a wavering state like young people’s. “The good command,” then, as the Scripture says, “is a lamp, and the law a light for the path; for discipline corrects the ways of life.” “Law is king of all, both of mortals and of immortals,” says Pindar — though by these words I understand the one who enacted the law. And the following lines of Hesiod I take as spoken of the God of all, though the poet threw them out at random and without understanding:

Whether, then, it is the law that is inborn and natural that is meant, or the one given later, it is certainly from God; and the law of nature and the law of instruction are one. So Plato too says, in the Statesman, that the lawgiver is one, and in the Laws that the man who is to understand music is one — teaching by these words that the Word is one and God is one. And Moses plainly calls the Lord a covenant: “Look, I am my covenant with you,” having told him beforehand not to look for the covenant in writing. For it is a covenant that God, the Author of all, makes. For God is called Theos from thesis, a placing, and from order and arrangement. And in the Preaching of Peter you will find the Lord called Law and Word. But here let the first patchwork of these notes — notes for the one who truly knows, following the true philosophy — come to an end.