Why the Wise Speak in Symbols

This is also why the Egyptians did not hand over the mysteries they had to just anybody, and did not disclose what they knew of divine things to the uninitiated. They gave them only to men in line for the throne, and to those priests who were judged worthiest by their upbringing, their education, and their birth. The riddles of the Egyptians, then, are like the Hebrew ones in the way they conceal. Some Egyptians show the sun on a ship, others on a crocodile. What they mean by this is that the sun, making its passage through sweet, moist air, generates time — and in another priestly account time is symbolized by the crocodile. At Diospolis in Egypt, too, on the temple called the Pylon, a boy was carved as the symbol of coming to be and an old man as the symbol of decay. A hawk stood for God, a fish for hatred, and, by a different symbolism, the crocodile for shamelessness. Put the whole set of figures together and it seems to teach this: “You who are born and die: God hates shamelessness.” [a]

There are also people who make ears and eyes out of costly material, consecrate them, and dedicate them in the temples to the gods — plainly indicating by this that God sees and hears everything. Besides, among them the lion is the symbol of strength and prowess, as the ox plainly is of the earth itself, and of farming and food, and the horse of courage and confidence; while the sphinx stands for strength combined with intelligence, since its body was a lion’s throughout and its face a man’s. In the same way a man is sculpted in the temples, to indicate intelligence and memory and power and skill. And at what they call the Komasiae of the gods they carry golden images about — two dogs, one hawk, and one ibis — and these four figures they call four letters. The dogs are symbols of the two hemispheres, which go around, as it were, and keep watch; the hawk is the sun, since it is fiery and destructive, which is why they put plagues down to the sun; and the ibis is the moon, its shadowy parts likened to what is dark in the bird’s plumage and its bright parts to what is light. Some will have it that the dogs mean the tropics, which guard and watch the sun’s passage to the south and to the north; that the hawk means the equator, which is high up and scorched with heat; and that the ibis means the ecliptic. For the ibis seems, more than any other animal, to have given the Egyptians their first rudiments of number and measure, as the slanting line did for circles.

But it was not only the most intellectual of the Egyptians who went in for the symbolic style; so did those non-Greeks elsewhere who pursued philosophy. They say that Idanthyrsus king of the Scythians — this is the account of Pherecydes of Syros — sent Darius, when he crossed the Ister threatening war, a symbol instead of a letter: a mouse, a frog, a bird, a javelin, and a plow. Naturally enough, there was doubt about what they meant. Orontopagas the commander said they meant the Persians were to give up the kingdom, taking the mouse for dwellings, the frog for waters, the bird for air, the plow for land, and the javelin for arms. But Xiphodres read it the other way around. He said, “Unless we take flight like birds, or get under the ground like mice, or under the water like frogs, we will not escape their arrows; for we are not masters of this country.” [e]

It is said that Anacharsis the Scythian, while he was asleep, covered his private parts with his left hand and his mouth with his right, to signal that both need mastering, but that mastering the tongue is the greater thing, greater than mastering pleasure.

And why should I linger over foreigners, when I can bring forward the Greeks themselves, who are exceedingly given to the method of concealment? Androcydes the Pythagorean says that the famous so-called Ephesian letters belong to the class of symbols. He said that askion, “shadowless,” means darkness, since darkness has no shadow; and kataskion, “shadowy,” means light, since light throws the shadow with its rays; and lix is the earth, by an ancient name for it; and tetras is the year, in reference to the seasons; and damnameneus is the sun, which overpowers (damazōn); and ta aisia is the true voice. So the symbol hints that divine things have been set in harmonious order — darkness matched to light, the sun to the year, and the earth to nature’s producing of every kind. Dionysius Thrax the grammarian, too, in his book On the Meaning of the Symbols in Circles, says plainly: “Some men signified actions not by words only, but by symbols as well: by words, as with what are called the Delphic maxims, ‘Nothing in excess,’ ‘Know yourself,’ and the like; and by symbols, as with the wheel that is turned in the temples of the gods, a practice taken from the Egyptians, and the branches that are given to the worshipers. For Orpheus the Thracian says:”

The branches either stand as the symbol of the first food, or else they are given so that the crowd may know that fruits spring up and grow everywhere and last a very long time, while the span of life allotted to them is short. That, they will have it, is why the branches are handed out — and perhaps also so that people may know that, just as the branches are burned in their turn, so they themselves quickly leave this life and become fuel for fire.

Very useful, then, is this way of reading symbols, and useful for many purposes. It helps toward speaking rightly about God, toward reverence, toward the display of intelligence, toward the practice of brevity, and toward the showing of wisdom. “For the use of symbolic speech belongs to the wise man,” as the grammarian Didymus aptly remarks, “and so does the explanation of what it signifies.” And in fact the most elementary teaching given to children takes in the interpretation of the four elements. For they say that the Phrygians call water bedu, as Orpheus also says:

Dion Thytes seems to write in the same way:

The comic poet Philydeus, on the other hand, takes bedu to be the air, as being biodōros, life-giving, in these lines:

Neanthes of Cyzicus agrees with the same opinion; he writes that the Macedonian priests call on bedu, which they take to mean the air, to be favorable to them and to their children. And zaps some people have ignorantly taken for fire, from zesis, boiling; but it is the sea that goes by that name, as Euphorion says in his reply to Theoridas:

And Dionysius Iambus likewise:

Similarly Cratinus the younger, the comic poet:

And Simmias of Rhodes:

And chthōn is the earth, poured out (kechymenē) to its great size. Plēktron, according to some, is the sky (polos); according to others it is the air, which strikes (plēssonta) and moves things toward growth and increase, and which fills everything. But these people have not read Cleanthes the philosopher, who expressly calls the sun plēktron; for as it darts its beams in the east, as though striking the world, it leads the light along its harmonious course. And from the sun it signifies the rest of the stars as well. And the Sphinx is not the comprehension of the universe and the revolution of the world, as the poet Aratus has it; perhaps it is rather the spiritual tension that runs through the universe and holds it together. But it is better to take it as the ether, which holds everything together and presses it in, as Empedocles also says:

And Apollodorus of Corcyra says that these lines were recited by Branchus the seer when he was purifying the Milesians from plague; for sprinkling the crowd with laurel branches, he led off the hymn something like this: “Sing, boys, Hecaergus and Hecaerga.” And the people sang along after him: “Bedu, zaps, chthōn, plēktron, sphinx, knaxzbi, chthyptes, phlegmos, drōps.”

Callimachus tells the story in iambics. Knaxzbi means, by derivation, the plague, from gnawing (knaiein) and destroying (diaphtheirein); and thypsai is to consume with a thunderbolt. Thespis the tragic poet says something else was signified by these words, writing this way: “See, I offer you a libation of white knaxzbi, pressed from the yellow nurses. See, for you, two-horned Pan, I mix chthyptes cheese with red honey and set it on your holy altars. See, for you I pour as a libation the sparkling gleam of Bromius.” He means, I think, the soul’s first milk-like food out of the twenty-four elements, after which curdled milk comes as its food. And last he teaches of the blood of the vine of the Word, the sparkling wine, the gladness of instruction that brings a man to maturity. And drōps is the Word at work, which begins with elementary training, goes on to the growing of the man, and sets him on fire and gives him light up to the full measure of maturity.

The third of these is said to be a writing copy for children: marptes, sphinx, klōps, zynchthēdon. In my opinion it signifies that we must advance, by way of the arrangement of the elements and of the world, to the knowledge of what is more perfect, since everlasting salvation is won by force and hard work; for marpsai is to grasp. The harmony of the world is meant by the sphinx; zynchthēdon means difficulty; and klōps means at once the secret knowledge of the Lord and the day. Well then — does not Epigenes, in his book on the poetry of Orpheus, where he sets out what is peculiar to Orpheus, say that by “the curved rods” (keraisi) plows are meant; that by “the warp” (stēmosi) the furrows are meant; that “the woof” (mitos) is a figure for the seed; that the tears of Zeus signify a rain shower; and that the “parts” (moirai) are the phases of the moon — the thirtieth day, the fifteenth, and the new moon — which is why Orpheus calls them “white-robed,” as being parts of the light? And again, that spring is called “flowery” from its nature; night “still,” because of rest; the moon “gorgonian,” because of the face in it; and that the season in which sowing must be done is called Aphrodite by the Theologian? In the same way the Pythagoreans figuratively called the planets “the dogs of Persephone,” and applied to the sea the metaphor “the tears of Kronos.” Countless riddling utterances by both poets and philosophers can be found; and there are whole books that keep the writer’s mind veiled, such as the On Nature of Heraclitus, who for this very reason is called “the Obscure.” Like it is the Theology of Pherecydes of Syros; and Euphorion the poet, and the Causes of Callimachus, and the Alexandra of Lycophron, and works of that kind, are set as exercises in exposition for all the grammarians.

It is right, then, that the foreigners’ philosophy, which it is our business to speak about, should prophesy obscurely and by symbols too, as has been shown. Such are the commands of Moses: “These common things — the sow, the hawk, the eagle, and the raven — are not to be eaten.” For the sow is the emblem of a pleasure-loving and unclean appetite for food, and of lecherous, filthy license in sex — always in heat, and material, and lying in the mire, and fattening for slaughter and destruction.

Again, he commands us to eat what parts the hoof and chews the cud. “He means,” says Barnabas, “that we ought to cleave to those who fear the Lord, and who turn over in their hearts the portion of the word they have received; to those who speak of the Lord’s statutes and keep them; to those for whom such turning over is a work of gladness, and who chew the cud on the word of the Lord. And what is the parted hoof? That the righteous man walks in this world and looks for the holy age to come.” Then he adds, “See how well Moses laid it down. But how could they have understood or taken in these things? We who have understood them rightly speak the commands as the Lord meant them; and that is why he circumcised our ears and our hearts, so that we might take them in. And when he says, ‘You shall not eat the eagle, the hawk, the kite, and the crow,’ he means, ‘You shall not stick to men like these, or become like them — men who do not know how to get their living by toil and sweat, but live by plunder and lawlessness.’ For the eagle indicates robbery, the hawk injustice, and the raven greed. It is written too: ‘With the innocent you will be innocent, and with the chosen, choice, and with the crooked you will be crooked.’ It is our duty to cleave to the holy ones, because those who cleave to them will be made holy.”

That is why Theognis writes:

And again, when it is said in the song, “For he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea” — the many-limbed and brutish passion, craving, with its rider mounted, the man who gives free rein to pleasures, is what he “has thrown into the sea,” flinging them away into the disorders of the world. So too Plato, in his book On the Soul, says that the charioteer and the horse that bolted — the irrational part, which divides in two, into anger and craving — go down together; and in the same way the story hints that it was through the wildness of the horses that Phaethon was thrown out. And so with Joseph. His brothers envied the young man, who by his knowledge had unusual foresight; they stripped off the coat of many colors, took him, and threw him into a pit — and the pit was empty, it had no water in it. They were rejecting the good man’s many-sided knowledge, which grew out of his love of learning; or else, holding only the bare faith that goes with the law, they threw him into a pit empty of water and sold him into Egypt, which had none of the divine Word. The pit was empty of knowledge; and thrown into it and stripped of his knowledge, the man who had become wise without knowing it looked, stripped, just like his brothers. Read another way, the coat of many colors is craving, which makes its way into a gaping pit.

“And if a man opens up or digs out a pit,” it says, “and does not cover it, and a calf or a donkey falls in there, the owner of the pit shall pay the price in money and give it to his neighbor, and the dead body shall be his.” Add to that the prophecy: “The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib; but Israel has not known me.” So then, in order that none of those who have met with the knowledge you teach should turn out unable to hold the truth, and should disobey and fall away, this is what is said: be sure-handed in your handling of the word; shut up the living spring in the depths, away from those who come at it without reason, but hold out drink to those who thirst for truth. Conceal it from those unfit to take in the depth of knowledge, and so cover the pit. The owner of the pit — the man who truly knows — will himself be punished, taking the blame for the others’ stumbling: either because they were overwhelmed by the greatness of the word while he himself was of small capacity, or because he moved a working man over into the region of speculation and by doing so dislodged him from his plain, ready faith. “And he will pay money,” rendering a reckoning and submitting his accounts to the all-powerful Will.

This, then, is the pattern of “the law and the prophets, which were until John.” John himself spoke more plainly, since he was no longer prophesying but pointing out as present the one who had been announced symbolically from the beginning; and even so he said, “I am not worthy to untie the strap of the Lord’s sandal.” He confesses that he is not worthy to baptize so great a Power; for those who purify others must free the soul from the body and from its sins as the foot is freed from the thong. Perhaps this also signified the last exertion of the Savior’s power toward us — the immediate one, I mean. His presence had been hidden in the riddle of prophecy; and John, by pointing out to sight the one who had been prophesied of, and showing that the Presence had come and had walked out into the light, untied the strap of the old order’s oracles and unveiled the meaning of the symbols.

The observances the Romans keep in the case of wills belong here as well: the balance and the small coins, to stand for justice; the freeing of slaves; and the pulling of the ear. These observances mean that business is to be transacted justly; that honor is to be dispensed; and, in the last case, that whoever happens to be standing nearby should stand and hear, as though a burden had been laid on him, and take the post of a go-between.