Truth Wrapped in Symbols

The one who hopes, like the one who believes, sees with the mind: he sees the things only the mind can reach, and the things still to come. When we say that something is just, or call something good, or say that truth is a real thing, we have never seen any of these with our eyes — only with our mind. And the Word of God says, “I am the truth.” So the Word is something the mind must look at. [a]

The question was put: “Do you say that there are any true philosophers?” “Yes,” I said, “those who love to gaze at the truth.” In the Phaedrus too, Plato speaks of truth and shows it to be an idea; and an idea is a thought of God, which is what the non-Greeks have called the Word of God. His words run this way: “One must dare to speak the truth, above all when the subject is truth itself. For the being of the soul is colorless, formless, and cannot be touched; it is visible only to God, the soul’s guide.”

The Word came forth and was the cause of creation; then he brought himself to birth as well, “when the Word became flesh,” so that he could be seen. The righteous man will look for the discovery that comes out of love, and if he hurries toward it he does well. For it is said, “To the one who knocks it will be opened; ask, and it will be given to you.” And “the violent who storm the kingdom” are not violent in argument. They are said “to take it by force” because they hold to a right life and never stop praying, wiping away the stains their earlier sins left behind.

So knowing your own ignorance is the first lesson in walking by the Word. A man who does not know has searched; having searched, he finds the teacher; having found, he has believed; having believed, he has hoped; and from then on, having loved, he grows like what he loved, working to become what he first loved. This is the method Socrates shows Alcibiades, who puts the questions:

“Don’t you think I will come to know what is right some other way?” “Yes — if you find it out.” “But you don’t think I have found it out?” “I do — if you have looked for it.” “Then you don’t think I have looked for it?” “I do — if you think you do not know.”

It is the same with the lamps of the wise young women, lit at night in the great darkness of ignorance — the darkness Scripture meant by “night.” Wise souls, pure as those young women, understand that they are standing in the middle of the world’s ignorance. So they light the lamp, wake the mind, light up the dark, drive out ignorance, look for truth, and wait for the Teacher to appear.

“So the crowd,” I said, “cannot become philosophers.” “Many carry the wand, but few are true followers of Bacchus,” as Plato has it. “For many are called, but few are chosen.” “Not everyone has this knowledge,” says the apostle. And, “Pray that we may be rescued from unreasonable and evil people; for not everyone has faith.” Cleanthes the Stoic writes to this effect in his Poetics:

And the comic poet puts it more pointedly in a single line: “It is a disgrace to settle what is right by making the most noise.” I think they had heard that excellent piece of wisdom which says to us, “Watch for your moment among fools; among the intelligent, stay on.” And again, “The wise will keep sense hidden.” For most people want a proof as the pledge of truth; the plain salvation that comes through faith is not enough for them.

“This is what the wicked always do,” says Empedocles: “they want to beat down what is true by refusing to believe it.” That what we hold is reasonable and worth believing, the Greeks will come to see; the point is looked into more thoroughly in what follows. For we are taught what is like by what is like. As Solomon says, “Answer a fool according to his folly.” So when people ask about the wisdom we have, we should hold out to them what suits them, so that by way of their own ideas they may come as easily as possible to faith in the truth. For “I became all things to all people, so that I might win them all.” And “the rain” of God’s grace is sent down “on the righteous and the unrighteous” alike. “Is he the God of the Jews only, and not of the Gentiles as well? Yes, of the Gentiles too — if indeed God is one,” the noble apostle cries.

But they will not believe in what is good for its own sake, nor in the knowledge that leads to salvation. So — since we for our part count what they claim as belonging to us, because everything belongs to God, and above all because what is good passed from us to the Greeks — let us handle these matters in the way they are able to hear them. This great crowd does not measure intelligence or uprightness by truth, but by whatever gives them pleasure; and nothing pleases them more than what is like themselves. A man who is still blind and mute, without understanding, and without that steady, undazzled sight of the soul that contemplates — the sight the Savior gives — must stand outside the divine chorus, like a man not initiated standing outside the mysteries, or a man with no ear for music standing at a dance. He is not yet pure, not yet worthy of the pure truth, but still out of tune, out of order, and nothing but matter. For “we match spiritual things with spiritual.” [o]

That is why, following the practice of concealment, the truly holy Word — truly divine, and most necessary to us — is stored away in the sanctuary of truth. The Egyptians pointed to it by what they called the adyta, and the Hebrews by the veil. Only the consecrated could go in: those given over to God, circumcised in their appetite for the passions out of love for the one thing that is divine. Plato too thought it not permitted for “the impure to touch the pure.” That is why prophecies and oracles are spoken in riddles, and why the mysteries are not put on show for anyone at all without restraint, but only after certain washings and some teaching beforehand.

Now those trained among the Egyptians learned first the style of Egyptian writing called epistolographic; second the hieratic, which the sacred scribes use; and last of all the hieroglyphic. Of the hieroglyphic, one kind works through the basic signs and states a thing outright — the kyriologic — and the other is symbolic. Of the symbolic, one kind speaks directly by imitating the thing; another writes as if in figures; and another is fully allegorical, working by riddles.

When they want to write “sun,” they make a circle; and for “moon,” a shape like the moon, following its own form. But in the figurative style they draw their characters by shifting words and carrying them over, by altering and reshaping them in whatever way suits them. When they tell the praises of their kings in myths about the gods, they write in carved reliefs. Take the following as a sample of the third kind, the riddling one. The rest of the stars, because their course runs at a slant, they have drawn like the bodies of snakes; but the sun they draw like a beetle, because the beetle shapes a round ball out of ox dung and rolls it along in front of itself. They say that this creature lives six months underground and the other part of the year above ground, that it releases its seed into the ball and so breeds, and that there is no female beetle.

In short, everyone who has spoken about divine things, non-Greek and Greek alike, has veiled the first principles and handed the truth down in riddles, symbols, allegories, metaphors and figures of that kind. The oracles among the Greeks are like this too, and the Pythian Apollo is called Loxias. So too the maxims of the men the Greeks call wise: in a few words they point to the unfolding of matters of real weight. “Spare time” is one of them. It may mean that life is short and we should not spend our time on nothing; or, on the other hand, it may be telling you to be sparing with what you spend on yourself, so that even if you live many years the necessities will not run out. In the same way the maxim “Know yourself” shows many things: that you are mortal; that you were born a human being; and that, set beside the other excellences of life, you count for nothing when you say you are rich or famous — or, taken the other way, that being rich or famous does not by itself earn you honor. And it says: know what you were born for, and whose image you are; know what your being is, and how you were made, and what your relation to God is, and the rest of it.

And the Spirit says through the prophet Isaiah, “I will give you treasures that are hidden and dark.” Now wisdom, hard to hunt down, is the treasure of God and wealth that never runs out. And the poets, taught in divine matters by those prophets, do much of their philosophy by way of a hidden sense — I mean Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus, Homer and Hesiod, and the wise men of that kind. For them the persuasive manner of poetry is a veil against the crowd. Dreams and signs are all more or less obscure to people, not because God grudges us anything — it would be wrong to think of God as subject to passions — but so that inquiry, by leading us into the understanding of riddles, may hurry on to the discovery of truth. So Sophocles the tragic poet says somewhere:

He puts “bad” where he means “simple.” About all our Scripture, then, as if it were spoken in a parable, it is written expressly in the Psalms: “Hear my law, my people; bend your ear to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in parables; I will speak out riddles from the beginning.” The noble apostle speaks in the same way: “Yet we do speak wisdom among the perfect — not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. We speak God’s wisdom, hidden in a mystery, which none of the rulers of this age knew; for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

The philosophers put no effort into despising the Lord’s appearing. So what the apostle is attacking must be the opinion of the wise men among the Jews. That is why he adds: “But we proclaim, as it is written, what no eye has seen and no ear has heard, what has never entered the human heart — what God has prepared for those who love him. For God has revealed it to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.” For he recognizes the spiritual man, the one who truly knows, as a pupil of the Holy Spirit whom God gives out; and that Spirit is the mind of Christ. “But the unspiritual man does not accept the things of the Spirit, for they are foolishness to him.”

And the apostle, setting the faith held in common against the perfection that belongs to true knowledge, calls that common faith the foundation, and sometimes milk. He writes this way: “Brothers, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but as people of flesh, as infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, because you were not able for it — and you are still not able. You are still people of flesh. When there is envy and strife among you, are you not people of flesh, living the way anyone lives?” These are the things sinners choose. But those who keep away from them turn their minds to divine things and share in the food that belongs to true knowledge. “By the grace given to me,” it says, “like a skilled master builder I laid the foundation, and someone else builds on it — gold, silver, precious stones.” That is the building of true knowledge raised on the foundation of faith in Christ Jesus. But “the straw, the wood and the hay” are what the sects add on. “And the fire will test each man’s work, to show what sort it is.” He points to this same building of knowledge in the letter to the Romans as well: “For I long to see you, so that I may share some spiritual gift with you, to make you strong.” Gifts of that kind could not possibly be written down undisguised.