Truth Behind a Veil

But it seems that in my eagerness to make my point I have gone further than I needed to without noticing it. My whole life would not be long enough to bring forward all the many people who do their philosophy by symbols. So, for the sake of memory and brevity, and of drawing people toward the truth, the Scriptures of the barbarian philosophy are written in just this way. [a]

They will supply the real philosophy and the true theology only to people who come back to them again and again, and who have put them to the test by faith and by the whole way they live. They also mean us to need an interpreter and a guide. The thought was this: that if we receive the truth from people who know it well, we will take it more seriously and be harder to deceive, and those who deserve it will gain by it. Besides, anything that shines through a covering makes the truth look grander and more impressive — like fruit shining through water, or shapes seen through a veil, which throw back extra highlights onto them. Things left uncovered are taken in one way only, and the light falling full around them shows up their flaws. Since, then, we can draw several meanings out of what is put in veiled form, that is how it stands: the ignorant and untrained man misses it, while the man of knowledge takes it in. It is not wanted, then, that everything be laid open to everyone alike, or that the benefits of wisdom be handed to people who have not been cleansed in soul even in a dream. What has been won by such hard labor may not be passed to whoever happens by, and the mysteries of the Word are not to be explained to the uninitiated.

They say that Hipparchus the Pythagorean was found guilty of writing down the teachings of Pythagoras in plain language, and that he was expelled from the school and a pillar set up for him as though he were dead. That is why in the barbarian philosophy too the people called dead are those who have fallen away from the teachings and have put their mind under the passions of the flesh. As the divine apostle says, “What partnership do righteousness and lawlessness have? What does light share with darkness? What agreement has Christ with Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?” For the honors paid to the Olympians and the honors paid to mortals lie apart. And so: “Come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord, and touch nothing unclean; and I will welcome you, and I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters.”

It was not only the Pythagoreans and Plato, then, who hid a great deal. The Epicureans too say they have things that must not be spoken, and they do not let everyone read those writings. The Stoics say that Zeno, the first of them, wrote things they are not willing to let their students read until the students have first given proof whether or not they are genuine philosophers. And the followers of Aristotle say that some of their treatises are for those inside the school and others are common property, for anyone at all. Then again, the men who set up the mysteries were philosophers, and they buried their teachings in myths so that they would not lie open to everyone. Now if they veiled merely human opinions to keep the ignorant from handling them, was it not far more useful that the holy and blessed contemplation of the things that really are should be hidden?

And it was not only the teachings of the barbarian philosophy, or the myths of the Pythagoreans. Even the myths in Plato — the story of Er the Armenian in the Republic, of Aeacus and Rhadamanthus in the Gorgias, of Tartarus in the Phaedo, of Prometheus and Epimetheus in the Protagoras, and besides these the war between the men of Atlantis and the Athenians in the Atlantis story — are to be taken as allegory: not in every word of them, but in the words that carry the general sense. And those we will find pointed at by symbols under the covering of allegory. So too with the society of Pythagoras, and its two ways of dealing with its members. The majority were called hearers, and those with a genuine attachment to philosophy were called students; and the two names meant that something was said to the crowd and something was kept back from them. Perhaps, too, the two kinds of teaching among the followers of Aristotle — the one called probable and the one called knowable — came very close to the same distinction: opinion on the one side, and glory and truth on the other.

The Ionic muses say it in so many words: “Most people, wise in their own estimation, follow the popular singers and make use of the laws, knowing that the many are bad and the good are few. But the best pursue glory: the best choose above everything else the everlasting glory of men. The crowd stuff themselves like cattle, measuring happiness by the belly and the genitals and the basest parts in us.” And the great Parmenides of Elea is brought in describing the teaching of the two ways this way:

So the divine apostle is right to say: “By a revelation the mystery was made known to me — as I wrote before, briefly, so that when you read it you can understand what I know of the mystery of Christ, which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men as it is now revealed to his holy apostles and prophets.” For there is a teaching meant for the perfect, and writing to the Colossians he speaks of it: “We do not stop praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that you may walk worthy of the Lord and please him in every way, bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with all power according to the glory of his might.” And again he says: “According to the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me, so that you may fulfill the word of God: the mystery hidden from ages and generations, which is now made plain to his holy ones. To them God wanted to make known the riches of the glory of this mystery among the nations.” [n]

So on the one hand there are the mysteries that were hidden until the time of the apostles, and were handed on by them as they had received them from the Lord — hidden away in the Old Testament and made plain to the holy ones. And on the other hand there is “the riches of the glory of this mystery among the nations,” which is faith and hope in Christ, and which in another place he has called the foundation. And again, as though he were in a hurry to let this knowledge out, he writes: “Warning every man in all wisdom, so that we may present every man perfect in Christ” — not every man without exception, since then no one would be an unbeliever; and he does not call every man who believes in Christ perfect either. He says all the man, as though he had said the whole man, cleansed in body and in soul. And to show plainly that this knowledge does not belong to everyone, he adds: “knit together in love, and reaching all the riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the knowledge of God’s mystery, in Christ, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.” “Keep on in prayer, staying alert in it with thanksgiving.” And thanksgiving has its place not for the soul and its spiritual gifts alone, but for the body too, and for the good things of the body. And he shows even more clearly that knowledge does not belong to everyone when he adds: “praying at the same time for you, that God would open a door for us to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains, so that I may make it known as I ought to speak.”

For among the Hebrews there were certainly some things handed on unwritten. “By this time you ought to be teachers,” it says — as of people who had grown old in the Old Testament — “yet you need someone to teach you all over again the first elements of God’s sayings. You have come to need milk, not solid food. Anyone who takes milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is an infant, being taught his first lessons. But solid food belongs to the full-grown, whose senses have been trained by use to tell good from bad. So let us leave the first principles of the teaching about Christ and go on to what is perfect.”

Barnabas too, who preached the word in person alongside the apostle in the work among the nations, says, “I am writing to you as plainly as I can, so that you will understand.” Then further down, showing a clearer trace by now of the tradition that belongs to knowledge, he says: “What does the other prophet, Moses, say to them? Look, this is what the Lord God says: Enter into the good land that the Lord swore to give, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; and you received that land as an inheritance, a land flowing with milk and honey. What does knowledge say? Learn, it says: hope in Jesus, who is going to be shown to you in the flesh. For man is the suffering land, since the shaping of Adam was from the face of the ground. What, then, does it say about the good land flowing with milk and honey? Blessed be our Lord, brothers, who has put wisdom into our hearts, and the understanding of his secrets. For the prophet says: Who will understand the Lord’s parable except the wise and understanding man, the man who loves his Lord?” Only a few can take these things in. For it was not out of grudging that the Lord announced in a Gospel, “My mystery is for me and for the sons of my house” — putting those he had chosen in safety, beyond anxiety, so that what his choice has taken hold of might be out of reach of envy. For the man who does not have the knowledge of what is good is wicked. There is one good, the Father; and not to know the Father is death, as to know him is eternal life, through a share in the power of the One who cannot decay. To be beyond decay is to have a share in what is divine, but turning away from the knowledge of God brings decay.

Again the prophet says, “And I will give you hidden treasures, dark and unseen, so that they may know that I am the Lord.” David sings in the same way, “Look, you have loved truth; you have shown me the obscure and hidden things of your wisdom.” “Day pours out speech to day” — that is what is written plainly — “and night announces knowledge to night” — that is what is hidden under a veil of mystery — “and there are no words or speeches whose voices are not heard” by God, who said, “Will a man do something in secret, and I not see him?”

That is why the instruction that uncovers hidden things is called illumination: the teacher is the only one who lifts the lid of the ark — the opposite of what the poets say, that “Zeus stops up the jar of good things and opens the jar of evils.” “For I know,” says the apostle, “that when I come to you I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ.” He means the spiritual gift and the handing on of knowledge, which he wants to share with them face to face when he is there, as “the fullness of Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery kept silent through ages of eternity but now made plain through the prophetic Scriptures, by the command of the eternal God, made known to all the nations so that they may obey in faith” — that is, to those of the nations who believe that it exists at all. But only to a few of them is it shown what the things are that the mystery holds.

Plato is right, then, when he writes about God in his Letters: “We must speak in riddles, so that if the tablet comes to grief anywhere by sea or by land, whoever reads it will be none the wiser.” For the God of everything, who is above all speech, above all conception and all thought, can never be set down in writing; he cannot be put into words even by his own power. Plato showed this too, when he said: “Take these things into account, then, and be careful that you do not one day regret what has been unworthily let loose now. The greatest safeguard is not to write but to learn by heart; for it is utterly impossible that what is written will not get out.”

Close to this is what the holy apostle Paul says, keeping safe the prophetic and truly ancient secret from which the Greeks drew whatever teachings of theirs were good: “We do speak wisdom among those who are perfect — not the wisdom of this age, or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing, but we speak God’s wisdom, hidden in a mystery.” Then, going on, he presses home the warning against letting his words out to the crowd, in these terms: “And I, brothers, could not speak to you as to spiritual people, but as to fleshly ones, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, because you were not yet able for it — and you are not able even now, for you are still fleshly.”

If, then, the apostle says the milk belongs to the infants and the solid food is the food of the full-grown, milk will be understood as the first instruction given to beginners — the soul’s first food, so to speak — and solid food is the contemplation of the mysteries. For that is the flesh and the blood of the Word, that is, the grasp of the divine power and being. “Taste and see that the Lord is Christ,” it is said. For that is how he gives a share of himself to those who take such food in a more spiritual way, when the soul is now feeding itself, as the truth-loving Plato has it. For the knowledge of the divine being is the food and drink of the divine Word. That is why Plato says, in the second book of the Republic, that the men who ought to inquire about God are those who sacrifice “not a sow, but some great and difficult sacrifice.” And the apostle writes, “Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us” — a sacrifice hard to come by indeed: the Son of God, consecrated for us.