Drawing Ourselves to God

It does not suit their own position that they should grasp, the way a man of knowledge grasps it, the truth that everything created for our use is good — marriage and the having of children, for instance, when they are used with restraint — and that it is better still than good to become free of passion, and to become virtuous by growing like God. When it comes to things outside us, pleasant or unpleasant, they keep away from some and not from others. But where they keep away out of disgust, they are plainly finding fault with what was made and with the one who made it; and though to all appearances they walk as believers, the opinion they hold is irreverent. The command “You shall not crave” needs no pressure of fear to force a man away from what is pleasant, and no reward to talk him, by its promise, into holding down the drives of passion. [a]

And those who obey God because of the promise, hooked by the bait of pleasure, choose obedience not for the sake of the command but for the sake of the promise. Nor does turning away from the things of the senses necessarily produce attachment to the things the mind takes hold of. It works the other way around: attachment to the things the mind takes hold of naturally becomes, for the man of knowledge, the pull that draws him away from the things of the senses — since in choosing what is good he has chosen it with knowledge, admiring the coming into being of things, and, by treating the Creator as holy, treating likeness to God as holy too. But let him say: “I will free myself from craving, Lord, for the sake of being joined to you. For the ordering of creation is good, and everything in it is well managed; nothing happens without a cause. I must be inside what is yours, Almighty. And if I am there, I am near you. I want to be free of fear, so that I can come close to you and be content with little, practicing your just choice between things that are good and things that only resemble them.”

The apostle taught us the choice that is truly gracious in a way full of mystery and reverence — not by throwing other things away as bad, but by doing what is better than good — when he said: “So the man who gives his virgin in marriage does well, and the man who does not give her does better” — as far as good order goes, and waiting on the Lord without distraction.

Now we know that what is hard is not necessary, and that what is necessary God has kindly made easy to reach. That is why Democritus puts it well: “Nature and teaching are much the same thing.” And we have already given the reason, briefly. Teaching brings a man into tune, and by bringing him into tune it makes him natural; and it makes no difference whether a man was made what he is by nature, or reshaped by time and training. The Lord has supplied both: what comes by creation, and what comes by creating again and making new through the covenant. And the thing to prefer is whatever is useful to the better part; and what is better than everything else is the mind. So what is really good turns out to be the most pleasant thing as well, and it produces of itself the fruit a man wants — calm of soul. “And the one who listens to me,” it says, “will settle down in peace, confident, and will be quiet with no fear of any evil.” “Lean on God with your whole heart and your whole mind.”

In this way it is possible for the man of knowledge to have become God already. “I said, you are gods, and sons of the Most High.” And Empedocles says that the souls of the wise become gods, writing this:

A human being, then, taken as a kind, is formed to match the idea of the spirit that is born with him. He is not made without form or shape in nature’s workshop, where the making of a human being is carried out in secret and where the craft and the substance are held in common. It is the individual man who is stamped according to the impression that the objects of his choice make on his soul. So we say that Adam was perfect as far as his formation went: none of the marks that belong to the idea and form of a human being were missing in him. But he received perfection in the act of coming into being. And he was counted righteous by obedience — that was his growing up, so far as it lay with him. The cause lay in his choosing, and above all in his choosing what was forbidden. God was not the cause.

For coming into being is of two kinds: of things begotten, and of things that grow. Courage, in a man who is liable to disturbance (as they say), makes the one who shares in it fearless and unbeatable in his very being; and spirited anger is the mind’s bodyguard in patience, endurance, and the like; and self-control and sound sense are set over craving. But God is beyond feeling, without anger, without desire. And he is not fearless in the sense of steering clear of what is terrible, nor self-controlled in the sense of having command over desires. For nothing terrible can meet the nature of God, and God does not run away from fear; just as he will not feel desire, and so has no desires to rule. That is why the Pythagorean saying was uttered about us in a hidden way, “that a man ought to become one.” For the high priest himself is one, God being one in the unchanging state of the perpetual running of good things. And the Savior has taken anger away together with craving, anger being a craving for revenge. For being open to feeling belongs, across the board, to every kind of desire; and a man, when he is made divine, purely, into a state free of passion, becomes a unit. So then: people at sea who are held by an anchor pull on the anchor, but they do not drag the anchor to themselves — they drag themselves to the anchor. In the same way, those who in the life of knowledge draw God toward themselves are, without noticing it, bringing themselves to God; for the man who reveres God reveres himself. In the contemplative life, then, a man in worshiping God attends to himself, and through his own spotless purifying he beholds the holy God in a holy way; for self-control, when it is present, surveying and contemplating itself without a break, is made like God as far as that is possible.

Now a thing is in our power when we are masters of it and of its opposite alike — to take up philosophy, say, or not to; to believe or to disbelieve. Since, then, we are equally masters of each of the opposites, what depends on us turns out to be possible. The commands can be kept or not kept by us, and so, as you would expect, we are open to praise and to blame. And those who are punished for the sins they have committed are punished for those sins alone; for what has been done is past, and what has been done can never be undone. Sins committed before faith, then, are forgiven by the Lord — not so that they may be undone, but as though they had not been done. But Basilides says: “Not all of them. Only sins that were involuntary and done in ignorance are forgiven.” That would hold if it were a man, and not God, who granted such a gift. To a man like that, Scripture says, “You thought that I would be like you.” [m]

But if we are punished for sins we chose, we are punished not so that what was done may be undone, but because it was done. Punishment does the man who has sinned no good toward undoing his sin; it is there so that he may not sin again, and so that no one else may fall into the same thing. So the good God corrects for these three reasons. First, so that the one being corrected may become better than he was before. Second, so that those who can be rescued by examples may be pulled back, having been warned. Third, so that the one who was wronged may not be easy to despise and so open to being wronged again. And there are two ways of correcting: the instructive and the punishing, which we have called disciplinary. It should be understood, then, that those who fall into sin after the washing are the ones who are put under discipline; what was done before is let go, and what is done after is burned clean. It is about those who do not believe that it is said that “they are counted as the chaff which the wind drives from the face of the earth,” and as “the drop that falls from a bucket.”

“Happy is the man who has the training that knowledge gives, who is not stirred to injure his fellow citizens or to unjust deeds, but looks at the ageless order of immortal nature — how it holds together, and in what way, and by what means. The practice of shameful deeds does not fasten itself on such men.” Rightly, then, Plato says that the man who gives himself to the contemplation of the ideas will live as a god among men; and that the mind is the place of the ideas, and God is mind. He says that the man who contemplates the unseen God lives as a god among men. And in the Sophist, Socrates calls the visitor from Elea, a master of argument, a god: “Such are the gods who haunt cities the way strangers do.” For when the soul rises above the sphere of coming-to-be and is by itself, apart, and lives among the ideas — like the chorus leader in the Theaetetus, become now like an angel — it will be with Christ, caught up in contemplation, always keeping the will of God in view; in reality [q]

“For the dead bury their dead.” That is why Jeremiah says, “I will fill it with the earth-born dead whom my anger has struck down.”

God, then, is not something that can be demonstrated, and so he cannot be an object of exact knowledge. But the Son is wisdom, and knowledge, and truth, and everything else akin to these; and he can be demonstrated and described. All the powers of the Spirit, becoming together one thing, come to rest at the same point — that is, in the Son. But he cannot be told out in terms of the idea of each single one of his powers. And the Son is not simply one thing as one thing, nor many things as parts, but one thing as all things; and so he is all things. For he is the circle of all the powers, rolled and gathered into one unity. That is why the Word is called the Alpha and the Omega, of whom alone the end becomes beginning, and ends again at the first beginning with no break anywhere. And that is why believing in him, and through him, is to become a unit, joined in him past all dissolving, while disbelieving is to be separated, pulled apart, divided.

“So this is what the Lord says: every alien son is uncircumcised in heart and uncircumcised in flesh” — that is, unclean in body and soul — “and not one of the strangers shall come into the middle of the house of Israel, but the Levites.” He calls those who would not believe, but chose to disbelieve, strangers. Only those who live purely are true priests of God. And so, of all the circumcised tribes, the ones anointed to be high priests and kings and prophets were counted holier. That is why he commands them not to touch dead bodies or go near the dead — not because the body was polluted, but because sin and disobedience had here been made flesh and given a body, and were dead, and therefore loathsome. It was only when a father or a mother, a son or a daughter had died that the priest was allowed to go in, because these were relatives by flesh and seed alone, and to them the priest owed the immediate cause of his coming into life. And they purify themselves for seven days, the stretch of time in which creation was finished. For on the seventh day the rest is kept, and on the eighth he brings an offering for sin, as is written in Ezekiel; and it is on the strength of that offering that the promise is to be received. And the perfect offering for sin, I take it, is that faith in the good news which wins God’s favor and which comes by way of the law and the prophets, together with the purity that shows itself in obedience all through, and the letting go of the things of the world — all so that we may hand back the tent gladly, which is what comes of the soul’s delight. Whether, then, the time meant is the one that runs through the seven periods counted off and comes back round to the chief rest, or the seven heavens, which some reckon one above the other, or whether the fixed sphere that borders on the world the mind takes hold of is called the eighth, the expression means that the man of knowledge ought to rise up out of the sphere of coming-to-be and of sin. After those seven days, sacrifices are offered for sins. For there is still fear of change, and it reaches as far as the seventh circle. The righteous Job says, “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked I will go back there” — not naked of possessions, which would be a small and ordinary thing, but, as a just man, he goes away naked of evil and sin and of the ugly shape that follows those who have lived badly. For this is what was meant by “Unless you turn and become like children” — pure in flesh, holy in soul by keeping away from evil deeds — showing that he wants us to be such as he also brought us to birth from our mother, the water. For the point of one generation following another is to make deathless by going forward. “But the lamp of the wicked will be put out.” That purity in body and soul which the man of knowledge shares in, Moses, wise in everything, pointed to by using repetition when he described the incorruption of body and of soul in the person of Rebecca: “Now the virgin was beautiful, and no man had known her.” And Rebecca, interpreted, means “glory of God”; and the glory of God is deathlessness. This, in reality, is righteousness: not to crave other things, but to be entirely the consecrated temple of the Lord. Righteousness is peace of life and a well-ordered condition, and it was into that condition that the Lord dismissed the woman when he said, “Go into peace.” For Salem, interpreted, is peace, and our Savior is enrolled as its king — as Moses says, “Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the Most High God,” who gave bread and wine, providing consecrated food as a figure of the thanksgiving. And Melchizedek is interpreted “righteous king”; and the name is another word for righteousness and peace. Basilides, however, supposes that Righteousness and her daughter Peace are stationed and living in the eighth sphere.

But we must move on from the study of nature to ethics, which are clearer; the discussion of them will follow after the treatise in hand. The Savior himself, then, plainly initiates us into the mysteries, in the words of the tragedy:

And if you ask,

you will hear again:

And if anyone presses to know exactly what they are, let him hear:

Now God, who has no beginning, is the perfect beginning of the whole universe and the maker of the beginning. As he is being, he is the first principle of the field of action; as he is good, of morals; as he is mind, on the other hand, he is the first principle of reasoning and of judgment. And so he alone is Teacher — he who is the only Son of the Most High Father, the Instructor of mankind.