The Body and the Heavenly City

So the people who run down created existence and abuse the body have it wrong. They do not consider that the human frame was built upright so that it could gaze at heaven, that the senses are arranged so as to run toward knowledge, and that the limbs and parts are laid out for what is good and not for pleasure. That is how this dwelling becomes fit to receive the soul, which God prizes above everything; it is honored with the Holy Spirit when soul and body are made holy together, and brought to completeness by the Savior’s own completeness. And the three virtues come one after another in the man who truly knows, who busies himself with God in the ethical, the natural and the logical parts of philosophy alike. For wisdom is the knowledge of things divine and human; righteousness is the agreement of the parts of the soul with one another; and holiness is the service of God. [a]

Suppose someone says that the prophet runs the flesh down, and human birth along with it, and quotes Isaiah, who says: “All flesh is grass, and all human glory is like the flower of grass. The grass has withered and the flower has fallen, but the word of the Lord lasts forever.” Then let him listen to the Spirit explaining the point through Jeremiah: “And I scattered them like dry sticks that the wind carries off into the desert. This is your lot, the portion measured out to you for your disobedience, says the Lord. Since you have forgotten me and put your trust in lies, I will strip you bare from behind, over your own face, and your disgrace will be seen — your adultery and your neighing,” and so it goes on. For “the flower of grass,” and “walking according to the flesh,” and “being fleshly,” in the apostle’s language, mean people who are living in their sins.

The soul of a man is admittedly the better part of him and the body the worse. But the soul is not good by nature, and neither is the body bad by nature. And a thing that is not good is not on that account bad: there are things that stand in the middle, and among them some are to be preferred and some to be rejected. A human being’s makeup, then, which has its place among the things the senses take in, had to be put together out of things that differ — body and soul — but not out of things opposed to each other. So good actions, being the better kind, always belong to the better and ruling spirit, while actions of self-indulgence and sin are charged to the worse part, the one that sins.

The soul of the wise man, the man who truly knows, lives in the body as a resident foreigner. It behaves toward the body with dignity and respect, but never with runaway affection, since it is ready to leave the tent as soon as the hour of departure calls. “I am a stranger on the earth, and a resident foreigner among you,” as it says. This is where Basilides gets his idea that the chosen are strangers to the world, being by nature from above it. But that is not so. All things are from one God, and no one is a stranger to the world by nature, since their substance is one and God is one. The chosen man does live as a resident foreigner, knowing that everything is held and let go again; and he makes use of the things the Pythagoreans class as the threefold goods. He treats the body the way a man sent on a long journey abroad treats the inns and lodgings along the road. He takes care of the things of the world, of the places where he halts; but he leaves lodging and property behind without a storm of feeling, and follows readily when he is led away from life. He does not turn back, on any account or at any point. He gives thanks for his stay, blesses God for his departure, and takes hold of the house that is in heaven.

“For we know that if the earthly house of our tent is taken down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For we who are in this tent groan, longing to be clothed over with the house that comes from heaven — if indeed, once clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we walk by faith, not by sight,” as the apostle says, and: “We would rather be away from the body and at home with God.” The word “rather” makes a comparison, and comparison holds among things that fall under one likeness: the braver man is braver among brave men, and bravest among cowards. That is why he adds, “So we make it our ambition, whether at home or away from home, to be pleasing to him” — that is, to God, whose work and creation everything is, the world and the things above the world alike. I admire Epicharmus, who says it plainly:

And the lyric poet sings:

So the soul is not sent down from heaven into something worse; God works everything up toward what is better. But the soul that has chosen the best life — the life that comes from God and from righteousness — trades earth for heaven. Job, then, who had come to knowledge, had good reason to say: “Now I know that you can do all things, and that nothing is impossible for you. For who is it that tells me things I did not know, great and wonderful things I had never met with? I made light of myself, and reckoned myself earth and ashes.” For the man who sins out of ignorance “is earth and ashes,” while the man who knows, made like God as far as that is possible, is already spiritual, and so one of the chosen.

That Scripture calls people who have no sense and will not obey “earth” is made clear by Jeremiah the prophet, who says of Joachim and his brothers: “Earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord. Write this man down as a man cried out of the city.” And another prophet says, “Hear, heaven, and give ear, earth,” calling understanding “ear,” and calling “heaven” the soul of the man who truly knows — the man who has given himself to the contemplation of heaven and of things divine, and has become an Israelite in that way. And again he calls the man who has chosen ignorance and a hard heart “earth.” The phrase “give ear” he takes from the organs of hearing, the ears, assigning what belongs to the flesh to people who cling to what the senses take in. These are the people Micah the prophet speaks of: “Hear the word of the Lord, you peoples who live in pain.” And Abraham said, “Certainly not. The Lord is the one who judges the earth” — since, in the Savior’s own words, whoever does not believe “has been judged already.”

And there stands written in the books of Kings the Lord’s judgment and sentence, in these terms: “The Lord hears the righteous, but he does not save the wicked, because they have no wish to know God.” For the Almighty will not bring about what is unreasonable. What do the sects say to a saying like that? Scripture announces that God the Almighty is good and is not the author of evil and wrong — while ignorance comes from a man’s own not knowing. And God does nothing unreasonable. “For this God,” it says, “is our God, and there is no one besides him who saves.” “For there is no unrighteousness with God,” as the apostle puts it.

And the prophet teaches plainly what God wants, and what progress in knowledge amounts to, in these words: “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you, except to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, and to serve him alone?” He asks it of you — of you, who have the power to choose salvation.

What do the Pythagoreans mean, then, when they tell us to pray out loud? Not, as it seems to me, that they thought the divine could not hear people who speak silently, but that they wanted prayers to be the kind no one would be ashamed to make with a crowd listening. We will deal with prayer in its own place further on. But our works are what ought to speak out loud, as suits people who “walk as in the day.” “Let your works shine” — and look at the man, and his works before his face; “for look: God, and his works.” For the man who truly knows must copy God as far as he can. And in their pages the poets call the choice men godlike, and gods, and equal to the gods, and a match for Zeus in judgment, and men whose plans are the gods’ own, and men who resemble the gods — nibbling, it seems to me, at the words “in the image and likeness.” Euripides says accordingly:

But I will pray the Spirit of Christ to give me wings to my own Jerusalem. For the Stoics say that heaven is a city in the proper sense, and that the places here on earth are not cities: they are called cities, but they are not. A city is a serious thing, and a people is an orderly body, a crowd of men governed by law, as the church is governed by the Word — a city on earth that cannot be stormed, with no tyrant over it, a thing made by God’s will on earth as in heaven. The poets draw images of this city with their pens: the Hyperboreans, the cities of the Arimaspians, and the plains of Elysium are all commonwealths of righteous men. And we know Plato’s city, laid up in heaven as a pattern.