Given, Not Taught

Everything, then, that falls under a name has come into being — whether they like it or not. So it may be that the Father himself draws to himself everyone who has lived a pure life and has arrived at the thought of that blessed and incorruptible nature; or it may be that the free choice in us, once it reaches the knowledge of the good, leaps and clears the barriers, as the trainers say. Either way, it is not without a surpassing grace that the soul grows wings and soars and is lifted above the higher spheres, laying aside everything heavy and giving itself over to the element it belongs to. [a]

Plato, too, in the Meno, says that virtue is God-given, as these words of his show: “From this line of reasoning, then, Meno, it appears that virtue comes by a divine allotment to those in whom it is found.” Does it not look as though “a divine allotment” is his riddling name for the settled state of one who truly knows — the state that has now come to everyone? And he says it more plainly still: “If, then, in this whole discussion we have inquired and spoken well, it follows that virtue is neither by nature nor taught, but comes by a divine allotment, and not without understanding, to those in whom it is found.” The wisdom God gives is the power of the Father, and it does rouse our free choice; it welcomes faith; and it repays the effort of the chosen with fellowship for a crown.

And now I will bring forward Plato himself, who plainly thinks it right to believe the children of God. Discussing the gods that can be seen and that were born, he says in the Timaeus: “But to speak of the other divine beings, and to know how they came to be, is beyond us. We have to trust the men who spoke of them before our time. They were, by their own account, the offspring of gods, and they surely knew their own forefathers — even though they speak without proofs that are likely or compelling.” I do not think the Greeks could bear plainer witness than that: our Savior, and those anointed to prophesy — the prophets being called sons of God, and the Lord being his own Son — are the true witnesses about divine things. So they ought to be believed, being inspired, as he added. And suppose someone says, in a more tragic vein, that we ought not to believe:

Then let him know that it was God himself who published the scriptures through his Son; and a man who announces what is his own is to be believed. “No one has known the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son reveals him,” says the Lord. On Plato’s own terms, then, this is to be believed, even though it is announced and spoken “without proofs that are likely or compelling” — announced, that is, in the Old Testament and the New. “Unless you believe, you will die in your sins,” says the Lord. And again: “Whoever believes has everlasting life.” “Blessed are all who put their trust in him.” For trust is more than faith. Once a man has believed that the Son of God is our teacher, he trusts that the teaching is true. And as “instruction,” Empedocles says, “makes the mind grow,” so trust in the Lord makes faith grow.

It belongs to the same people, we say, to run philosophy down and to run faith down, and also to praise wrongdoing and call a life of lust a happy one. But faith, if it is the soul’s willing assent, is still the doer of good things and the foundation of right conduct. And if Aristotle is speaking strictly when he teaches that “making” is said of animals without reason and of lifeless things, while “doing” is said of human beings only, then let him correct the people who call God the maker of the universe. A thing is done, he says, either as good or as necessary. Doing wrong, then, is not good, since no one does wrong except for the sake of something else; and nothing necessary is voluntary. Doing wrong, then, is voluntary — and so it is not necessary. The good differ from the bad above all in their leanings and in what they want. For every corruption of the soul comes with a lack of self-control, and the man who acts out of passion acts out of a lack of self-control and out of corruption.

I cannot help admiring, down to the last detail, that divine saying: “Truly, truly, I tell you, whoever does not come into the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in some other way, is a thief and a robber. But the one who comes in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the doorkeeper opens.” Then the Lord explains it: “I am the door of the sheep.” People must be saved, then, by learning the truth through Christ — even those who have laid hold of philosophy. For now the thing is plainly shown “which was not made known to other generations, and is now revealed to the sons of men.”

There was always a natural showing of the one Almighty God among all right-thinking people, and most of those who had not entirely thrown off their shame before the truth did take in the everlasting kindness at work in divine providence. Xenocrates of Chalcedon, in short, was not without hope that even animals without reason have some notion of the divine. And Democritus, against his will, will grant as much by what follows from his own teachings, since he has the same images streaming from the divine being onto human beings and onto animals without reason alike.

A human being is far from being without an idea of God — the one who, as it is written in Genesis, was given a share of the breath, and was made of a purer stuff than the other living creatures. That is why the Pythagoreans say that mind comes to a person by divine providence, as Plato and Aristotle also admit; but we say that the Holy Spirit breathes into the one who has believed. The Platonists hold that mind is an outflow of a divine allotment into the soul, and they place the soul in the body. For Joel, one of the twelve prophets, says it in so many words: “And it will happen after these things that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy.” But the Spirit is not in each of us as a piece of God. How this allotment takes place, and what the Holy Spirit is, we will show in our books on prophecy and on the soul. But, as Heraclitus says, “unbelief is good at hiding the depths of knowledge; through unbelief they escape being known.”