Greek Borrowings from the Hebrews

Let me add what is still owed and show more clearly now how the Greeks stole from the barbarian philosophy. The Stoics say that God, like the soul, is in his essence body and spirit. You will find all of this stated outright in their own books. For the moment, do not weigh their allegories the way the truth is set out by the one who truly knows — whether they say one thing and mean another, like wrestlers quick on their feet. What they say is that God runs through everything that is; while we call him Maker and nothing else, and Maker by his Word. They were misled by a line in the book of Wisdom: “He runs through and passes through all things because he is pure.” They did not understand that this was said of Wisdom, which was the first thing God created. [a]

“So be it,” they say. But the philosophers — the Stoics, and Plato, and Pythagoras, and Aristotle the Peripatetic besides — hold that matter is one of the first principles, and that there is not one first principle only. Then let them notice that what they call matter is said by them to have no quality and no form, and that Plato says, more daringly still, that it is non-being. And does he not speak very mysteriously, knowing that the true and real first cause is one, in these very words: “Let this, then, be our opinion. As for the first principle, or the first principles, of the universe, and what we ought to think about all such questions, we are not to speak now, for no other reason than that it is hard to set out what we think in the form this discussion has taken.” But what surely gave them their ground for the idea of material being was the prophet’s sentence, “Now the earth was unseen and unshaped.” That is also where Epicurus got his “chance,” misunderstanding the words “Empty, utterly empty; everything is empty.” And it occurred to Aristotle to stretch God’s oversight no further than the moon, out of this psalm: “Lord, your mercy is in the heavens, and your truth reaches to the clouds.” For the meaning of the prophets’ hidden sayings had not yet been opened before the Lord came.

Punishment after death, and paying the penalty in fire, were pilfered from the barbarian philosophy both by all the poets’ Muses and by Greek philosophy. Plato, for instance, in the last book of the Republic, says in these very words: “Then men fierce and fiery to look at, standing by and hearing the sound, seized some of them and led them off; and Ardiaeus and the rest they bound hand and foot and head, threw down, flayed, and dragged along the road, tearing their flesh on thorns.” The fiery men stand for the angels, who seize the wicked and punish them. “He makes his angels spirits,” it says, “and his ministers a flame of fire.” It follows from this that the soul does not die. What is tortured, or corrected, is in a state of feeling and therefore alive, even though we say it suffers. Well then — did Plato not know the rivers of fire and the deep places of the earth, and Tartarus, which the barbarians call Gehenna, when he names, in the manner of a prophet, Cocytus and Acheron and Pyriphlegethon, and brings in punishments of that kind as a correcting discipline? And pointing to “the angels” — as the Scripture says, the angels “of the little ones, of the least, who see God” — and to the watch that guardian angels keep over us, he does not shrink from writing: “When all the souls have chosen their lives, in the order their lots fell to them, they go up to Lachesis; and she sends along with each one, as the guardian of his life and the helper who carries out his purposes, the spirit he has chosen.” Perhaps Socrates’ own guardian spirit suggested something like this to him too.

Again, the philosophers heard it from Moses and so taught that the world came into being. Plato says so outright: “Did the world have no beginning of its existence, or did it take its beginning from some beginning? It is visible, and so it can be touched; and being touchable, it has a body.” And when he says, “It is hard work to find the Maker and Father of this universe,” he not only showed that the universe came into being, but points out that it was brought forth by him as a son is, and that he is called its father because it has its being from him alone and sprang out of nothing. The Stoics too hold that the world came into being. And that the devil the barbarian philosophy speaks of — the ruler of the demons — is a wicked spirit, Plato states in the tenth book of the Laws, in these words: “Must we not say that the spirit which drives the things that are moved in every direction drives heaven too? Well then, one spirit or more? More, I will answer for you. Let us not suppose fewer than two: the one that does good, and the one that is able to do the opposite.” In the Phaedrus he writes much the same: “There are other evils besides. But some spirit has mixed pleasure into most things as they now are.” And in the tenth book of the Laws he puts out, word for word, that saying of the apostle, “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against rulers, against powers, against the spiritual forces in the heavens.” He writes: “Since we agree that heaven is full of many good beings, it is also full of the opposite of these, and of more of them; and we say that this contest is deathless and needs astonishing watchfulness.”

Again, the barbarian philosophy knows a world that only the mind reaches and a world the senses reach — the first the pattern, the second the image of what is called the model. It assigns the first to the Monad, since the mind perceives it, and the world of the senses to the number six. Six is called marriage by the Pythagoreans, being the number that begets. In the Monad he places the unseen heaven and the holy earth and the light the mind sees. For “in the beginning,” it says, “God made the heaven and the earth; and the earth was unseen.” And it adds, “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.” Then in the making of the material world he creates a solid heaven — and what is solid can be perceived by the senses — and a visible earth, and a light that is seen. Does Plato not look, then, as though he took the forms of living creatures from this and left them in the world of thought, and made the objects of thought into the kinds of things the senses see, each according to its class? So Moses is right when he says that the body, which Plato calls “the earthly tent,” was shaped out of the ground, and that the reasoning soul was breathed by God into the man’s face. For that, they say, is where the ruling part sits; they read the way the senses come into the first man as the soul being added.

That is why man is said “to have been made in God’s image and likeness.” For the image of God is the divine and royal Word, the man who cannot suffer; and the image of that image is the human mind. And if you want to grasp the likeness under another name, you will find it named in Moses as a divine correspondence: “Walk after the Lord your God, and keep his commands.” And I count all people of virtue as servants of God and followers of him. This is why the Stoics say that the end of philosophy is to live in agreement with nature, and Plato says it is likeness to God, as we showed in the second book of these Miscellanies. And Zeno the Stoic, borrowing from Plato, and Plato from the barbarian philosophy, says that all good men are friends of one another. For Socrates says in the Phaedrus “that it has not been laid down that the bad should be friend to the bad, nor that the good should not be friend to the good”; and he showed well enough in the Lysis that friendship is never kept up in wickedness and vice. The Athenian stranger says much the same: “that there is a conduct that pleases God and matches him, resting on one old ground-rule — that like loves like, provided it keeps within measure. But things past measure are at home neither with what is within measure nor with what is beyond it. Now as it happens, God is the measure of all things for us.” Then Plato adds: “For every good man is like every other good man; and being in that way like God, he is loved by every good man and by God.”

At this point I have just remembered the following. At the end of the Timaeus he says: “You must make the thing that perceives like the thing that is perceived, according to its first nature; and it is by making it like that that you reach the end of the best life the gods have set before people, for the present time or for the time to come.” The two have equal force. The one who seeks will not stop until he finds; and having found, he will be amazed; and being amazed, he will reign; and reigning, he will rest. And what of this? Did the sayings of Thales not come from the same source? He is interpreting the fact that God is praised forever, and that we call him outright the Searcher of hearts. For Thales was asked what the divine is, and said, “What has no beginning and no end.” And when another man asked whether someone could escape God’s notice while doing anything, he said, “How could he, when he cannot even while he is thinking?”

Further, the barbarian philosophy recognizes that the good alone is excellent, and that virtue is enough for happiness, when it says, “See, I have set before your eyes good and evil, life and death; choose life.” It calls the good “life,” and calls choosing it excellent, and choosing the opposite “evil.” And the end of the good, and of life, is to become a lover of God: “for this is your life and the length of your days” — to love what leads toward the truth. These points grow clearer still. For the Savior, in commanding us to love God and our neighbor, says “that on these two commands hang the whole law and the prophets.” The Stoics teach the same, and before them Socrates did, in the Phaedrus, where he prays, “Pan, and you other gods, grant me to be beautiful within.” And in the Theaetetus he says outright, “The man who speaks finely is both beautiful and good.” And in the Protagoras he tells Protagoras’ companions that he has met someone more beautiful than Alcibiades — if indeed what is wisest is most beautiful. For he said that virtue is the soul’s beauty and vice the soul’s ugliness. So Antipater the Stoic, who wrote three books on the point that according to Plato only the beautiful is good, shows that in Plato’s view virtue is enough for happiness, and brings forward a number of other teachings that agree with the Stoics. And Aristobulus, who lived in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and who is mentioned by the man who made the summary of the books of the Maccabees, wrote plenty of books to show that the philosophy of the Peripatetics came out of the law of Moses and the other prophets. Let that be as it may.

Plato plainly calls us brothers, as coming from one God and one teacher, in these words: “You in the city are all brothers” — that is what we shall say to them, going on with our story — “but the God who formed you mixed gold into those of you who are fit to rule, at your birth, and that is why you are held in the highest honor; and silver into those who are helpers; and iron and bronze into the farmers and the other workmen.” From this some necessarily take up and love the things that knowledge is about, and others the things of opinion. Perhaps he is prophesying about that chosen nature which is bent on knowledge — if, by supposing three natures, he is not describing three ways of living, as some have supposed: that of the Jews the silver, that of the Greeks the third, and that of the Christians, into whom the royal gold has been mixed, the Holy Spirit, the golden one.

And he writes in the Theaetetus, showing the Christian life, in these words: “Let us now speak of the highest kind. Why should we speak of those who abuse philosophy? These men know neither the way to the marketplace, nor where the court is, or the council chamber, or any other public meeting of the city. Laws and decrees, spoken or written, they neither see nor hear. Party feeling in political clubs, and public meetings, and parties with musicians — they never so much as dream of taking part. Has anyone in the city behaved well or badly? Has some evil come down to a man from his forefathers? It escapes his notice as completely as the sands of the sea. And the man does not even know that he does not know all this. In fact only his body is set down and lives in the city, while the man himself, as Pindar says, flies below the earth and above the sky, doing his astronomy and searching out the whole nature of things on every side.”

Again, the Lord’s saying, “Let your yes be yes and your no, no,” can be set beside this: “To admit a falsehood and destroy a truth is in no way lawful.” And with the ban on swearing agrees the saying in the tenth book of the Laws: “Let praise and an oath be absent from everything.” And in general, Pythagoras and Socrates and Plato say that they hear God’s voice while they look closely at the fabric of the universe, which God makes and keeps in being without pause. For they had heard Moses say, “He spoke, and it was done,” describing the word of God as a deed.

And because man was formed out of dust, the philosophers keep calling the body earthy. Homer too does not hesitate to put this in as a curse:

As Isaiah says, “And he will trample them down like clay.” And Callimachus writes plainly:

And the same poet again:

Hesiod says of Pandora:

The Stoics, then, define nature as a craftsman’s fire, advancing by method toward the making of things. And Scripture calls God and his Word fire and light, speaking in a figure. But look: is Homer himself not putting into other words the drawing back of the water from the land, and the clean uncovering of the dry ground, when he says of Tethys and Ocean:

Again, the most thoughtful of the Greeks give all power to God. Epicharmus — he was a Pythagorean — says:

And the lyric poet:

Only the one who is able to make night in the middle of the day is God.

In the Phaenomena Aratus writes this:

He adds:

that is, by his making us.

And before him Homer, framing the world in agreement with Moses on the shield Hephaestus made, says:

For the Zeus that poems and prose celebrate leads the mind up to God. And Democritus writes already, so to speak: “A few men are in the light, who stretch out their hands toward the place we Greeks now call the air. Zeus says everything, and hears everything, and gives and takes away, and he is king over all.” And Pindar of Boeotia, who was a Pythagorean, says it more mysteriously:

that is, from matter. And he names one maker of these things, whom he calls Father, the chief craftsman, who supplies the means of climbing on toward divinity as each deserves.

I pass over Plato. In his letter to Erastus and Coriscus he plainly appears to set out the Father and the Son somehow or other from the Hebrew Scriptures, urging them in these words: “Calling to witness by oath, with a seriousness that is not unschooled, and with culture, the sister of seriousness — calling on God, the author of all things, and swearing by him as the Lord, the Father of the Leader and Author; whom you will come to know if you study in a truly philosophical spirit.” And the address in the Timaeus calls the creator Father, speaking this way: “Gods of gods, of whom I am Father and the Maker of your works.” So that when he says, “Around the king of all are all things, and because of him are all things, and he is the cause of all good things; and around the second are the things that are second, and around the third the third,” I understand him to mean nothing else than the holy triad: the third is the Holy Spirit, and the Son is the second, through whom all things were made according to the Father’s will.

And the same Plato, in the tenth book of the Republic, mentions Er the son of Armenius, who is Zoroaster. Zoroaster writes: “These things were written by Zoroaster, son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth. Having died in battle and been in Hades, I learned them from the gods.” This Zoroaster, Plato says, was laid on the funeral pyre and came back to life on the twelfth day. Perhaps he is hinting at the resurrection; or perhaps at the idea that the road by which souls climb runs through the twelve signs of the zodiac — and he says himself that the road down to birth is the same one. In the same way we are to understand the twelve labors of Heracles, after which the soul gets its release from this whole world.

I do not pass over Empedocles, who speaks in the manner of a natural philosopher about the renewal of all things: it consists in a change into the substance of fire, and it is going to happen. And Heraclitus of Ephesus is most plainly of the same opinion. He held that there is a world that lasts forever, and recognized another that perishes — perishable in its arrangement, and not a different world from the first, only looked at in a certain way. But that he knew the imperishable world, the one made of the universal substance, to be everlastingly of a certain nature, he makes clear by speaking this way: “This world, the same for all, none of the gods and none of men made. But it was and is and always will be ever-living fire, kindled by measure and put out by measure.” And that he taught it to come into being and to perish is shown by what follows: “There are turnings of fire: first the sea; and of the sea, half is land and half is fiery storm-cloud.” He says these are the effects of power. For fire is changed by the Word of God, who governs all things, through the air into moisture, which is as it were the seed of the world’s change; and this he calls sea. Out of it in turn earth is produced, and sky, and everything they hold. And how they are restored and set alight again he shows plainly in these words: “The sea is poured out and measured by the same rule that held before it became earth.” The same is to be understood of the other elements. The most famous of the Stoics teach the same as he does when they treat of the world’s burning and its government, and of the world and of man properly so called, and of the survival of our souls.

Plato again, in the seventh book of the Republic, has called “the day here a night,” because, I suppose, of “the world-rulers of this darkness”; and he calls the soul’s descent into the body sleep and death, just as Heraclitus does. And was this not announced beforehand about the Savior, like an oracle, by the Spirit speaking through David: “I lay down and slept; I woke, for the Lord will hold me up”? For he not only calls the resurrection of Christ a getting up from sleep, speaking in a figure; he also uses “sleep” as a figure for the Lord’s coming down into flesh. The Savior himself commands, “Keep watch” — as much as to say, “Practice living, and work at separating the soul from the body.”

And Plato speaks prophetically of the Lord’s day in the tenth book of the Republic, in these words: “And when seven days have passed for each of them in the meadow, on the eighth they must set out and arrive in four days.” By the meadow we are to understand the sphere of the fixed stars, as being a mild and pleasant place and the region of the godly; by the seven days, each motion of the seven planets, and the whole practical skill that hurries toward the end, which is rest. But after the wandering stars the journey leads to heaven, that is, to the eighth motion and the eighth day. And he says the souls have gone on the fourth day, pointing to the passage through the four elements. The seventh day is recognized as sacred not by the Hebrews only but by the Greeks as well, and by it the whole world of animals and plants turns. Hesiod says of it:

And again:

And Homer:

And:

And again:

And again:

Callimachus the poet also writes:

And again:

And:

And:

The Elegies of Solon, too, make a great deal of the seventh day as divine.

And how? Is it not like the Scripture that says, “Let us get rid of the righteous man, because he is a nuisance to us,” when Plato, all but foretelling how our rescue would be worked out, says in the second book of the Republic: “So the man who is truly just will be whipped, will be racked, will be bound, will have his eyes burned out; and at the end, after suffering every evil, he will be impaled on a stake”? And Antisthenes the follower of Socrates, putting into other words that saying of the prophet, “To whom have you likened me? says the Lord,” says that “God is like no one; and so no one can come to know him from an image.” Xenophon the Athenian says much the same in these words: “The one who shakes all things and is himself unmoved is plainly great and powerful. But what he is like in form does not appear. No more does the sun, who wants to shine in every direction, think it right to let anyone look at him; and if a man stares at him boldly, he loses his sight.”

so the Sibyl had said before him. Rightly, then, Xenophanes of Colophon, teaching that God is one and has no body, adds:

And again:

And again:

Now let us hear the lyric poet Bacchylides speaking of the divine:

And Cleanthes the Stoic, who writes this in a poem about God:

And the same man, quietly running down the idol-worship of the crowd, adds:

We are not, then, to think of God the way the crowd does.

says Amphion to Antiope. And Sophocles writes plainly:

He goes on and adds:

Then he sets out still more plainly the loose living of the Zeus of the stories:

But let all that be left to the follies of the theater.

Heraclitus says plainly: “Of the word which is forever men have no understanding, either before they have heard it or when they first hear it.” And Melanippides the lyric poet says in song:

And the great Parmenides, as Plato says in the Sophist, writes of God this way:

Hesiod also says:

What is more, tragedy draws people away from idols and teaches them to look up to heaven. Sophocles — so Hecataeus says, who wrote the histories, in his work about Abraham and the Egyptians — cries out plainly on the stage:

And Euripides says on the stage, in tragedy:

And in the play Pirithous the same writer puts these lines in the tragic manner:

For there he says that the creating mind is self-sprung. What follows applies to the universe, in which light and darkness stand opposite one another. Aeschylus son of Euphorion also speaks of God with great solemnity:

I know that Plato agrees with Heraclitus, who writes: “The one thing that is wise alone will not be spoken, and it means the name of Zeus.” And again, “Law is to obey the will of one.” And if you want to bring forward the saying, “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear,” you will find it said by the man of Ephesus like this: “Those who hear without understanding are like the deaf. The proverb bears witness against them: present, they are absent.”

But do you want to hear from the Greeks in so many words about one first principle? Timaeus of Locri, in his work on Nature, will testify in these words: “There is one first principle of all things, and it did not come into being. For if it had come into being it would no longer be the first principle; the first principle would be whatever it came from.” This true opinion was drawn from what follows: “Hear, Israel: the Lord your God is one, and him only shall you serve.” “Look — he is wholly sure and wholly without error,” says the Sibyl. Homer, too, plainly mentions the Father and the Son, hitting it by a lucky stroke of divination, in these words:

And before him Orpheus said, speaking to the point in hand:

And Xenocrates of Chalcedon, who mentions a supreme Zeus and a lower Zeus, leaves a hint of the Father and the Son. Homer, while presenting the gods as subject to human passions, does appear to know the divine Being, whom Epicurus does not revere in the same way. He says accordingly:

For he shows that the divine cannot be caught by a mortal, or laid hold of with feet or hands or eyes, or by the body at all. “To whom have you likened the Lord? or to what likeness have you likened him?” says the Scripture. “Has not the craftsman made the image? Or the goldsmith, melting the gold, has gilded it” — and what follows.

The comic poet Epicharmus speaks plainly about the Word, in the Republic, in these terms:

Then he adds outright:

Then:

The Spirit also cries out through Isaiah: “Why the crowd of your sacrifices? I am full of whole burnt offerings of rams, and I do not want the fat of lambs and the blood of bulls.” And a little later he adds, “Wash yourselves, be clean. Put wickedness away from your souls,” and so forth.

Menander, the comic poet, writes in these very words:

“I am a God near at hand,” it is said by Jeremiah, “and not a God far off. Shall a man do anything in secret places, and I not see him?” And again Menander, putting into other words that Scripture, “Sacrifice a sacrifice of righteousness, and trust in the Lord,” writes:

“While you are still speaking,” says the Scripture, “I will say, Here I am.”

Again, Diphilus the comic poet talks like this about the judgment:

And with this the tragedy agrees, in the following lines:

And a little later he adds:

We shall find sayings like these in the Orphic hymns too, written this way:

And if we live all through in holiness and righteousness, we are happy here, and shall be happier after we go from here — not holding happiness for a time, but able to rest in it forever.

says the philosophical poetry of Empedocles. And so, by the Greeks’ own account, no one is so great as to be above judgment, and no one so small as to escape its notice. And the same Orpheus speaks this way:

And again about God, saying that he was unseen and that he was known to one man only, a Chaldean by race — meaning by this either Abraham or his son — he speaks as follows:

Then, as if putting the words “Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool” into other language, he adds:

And so forth. For in these lines he points to those prophetic sayings: “If you open the heaven, trembling will seize the mountains at your presence, and they will melt as wax melts before the fire”; and in Isaiah, “Who measured the sky with the span of his hand, and held the whole earth in his fist?” Again, when it is said:

Then he adds, naming the Almighty God outright:

By the phrase “Sire of our mother” he not only hints at creation out of nothing, but also gives an opening to those who bring in emanations, so that they imagine a consort for God. And he puts into other words those prophetic Scriptures: the one that says, “I am he who fixes the thunder and creates the wind, whose hands founded the host of heaven”; and the one in Moses, “See, see that I am he, and there is no god besides me. I kill, and I make alive; I strike, and I heal; and there is no one who can rescue out of my hands.”

according to Orpheus. The words of Archilochus of Paros are of the same kind:

Again, let Orpheus of Thrace sing to us:

These are plainly taken from the following: “The Lord will save the inhabited cities, and grasp the whole land in his hand like a nest”; and “It is the Lord who made the earth by his power,” as Jeremiah says, “and set up the world by his wisdom.” Further, in addition to these, Phocylides, who calls the angels spirits, explains in the following words that some of them are good and others bad — for we too have learned that some are in revolt:

Rightly then Philemon the comic poet demolishes idolatry in these words:

And Sophocles the tragedian says:

And Orpheus:

And so forth. Pindar the lyric poet, as if in a Bacchic frenzy, says plainly:

And again:

And when he says,

he drew the thought from this: “Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” Hesiod agrees too with what has been said, where he writes:

And in the same way Solon the Athenian, following Hesiod, writes in the Elegies:

Again, Moses prophesied that the woman would bring forth in trouble and pain on account of the transgression; and a poet of some standing writes:

Further, when Homer says,

he means that God is just. And Menander the comic poet, in setting God out, says:

Then he adds a line that can be taken two ways: either “that everyone good is God,” or — which is better — “that God is good in everything.” Again, Aeschylus the tragedian, setting out the power of God, does not shrink from calling him the Highest, in these words:

Does he not seem to you to be putting into other words the text, “At the presence of the Lord the earth trembles”? Besides these, Apollo, the great prophet, is forced — bearing witness in this way to the glory of God — to say of Athene, when the Medes made war on Greece, that she begged and pleaded with Zeus for Attica. The oracle runs like this:

and so forth. Thearidas, in his book On Nature, writes: “There was, then, one truly real beginning of all the things that exist — one. For that Being in the beginning is one and alone.” “And there is no other except the Great King,” says Orpheus. In agreement with him, Diphilus the comic poet says, in the manner of a maxim:

Rightly, therefore, Plato “trains the best natures to reach that study which we said before was the highest — both to see the good and to make that ascent. And this, it appears, is not the throwing of the potsherds, but the turning round of the soul from a day that is really night, to a true return toward what really is; and this we shall call the true philosophy.” Those who share in it he judges to belong to the golden race, when he says: “You are all brothers; and those of the golden race are most able to judge most exactly in every matter.”

The Father, then, and Maker of all things is grasped by all things, in the way each is able, by an inborn power and without being taught — things without life feeling along with the living creation; and of living beings, some are already deathless and work in the light of day, while of those still mortal, some are afraid and are still being carried in the mother’s womb, and others govern themselves by their own independent reason. And of men, all are either Greeks or barbarians. But nowhere is there a race of tillers of the soil, or of wandering herdsmen, or even of city-dwellers, that can live without being soaked through with the belief in a higher being. That is why every nation of the east, and every nation along the western shores, and the north, and each one toward the south, all hold one and the same idea beforehand about the one who has appointed government; since the most universal of his workings reach all alike. Much more, then, did the philosophers among the Greeks, given to investigation and starting from the barbarian philosophy, credit providence to “the invisible and only and most powerful and most skilful and highest cause of all the most beautiful things” — not knowing what follows from these truths unless we teach them, and not even knowing how God is to be known by nature, but only, as we have often said already, by a roundabout description. So the apostle is right to say, “Is he the God of the Jews only, and not of the Greeks as well?” — saying prophetically not only that Greeks who came to believe would know God, but also hinting that in power the Lord is the God of all, and truly a universal King. For they know neither what he is, nor how he is Lord and Father and Maker, nor the rest of the framework of the truth, unless they are taught it by the truth itself.

So the prophets’ words have the same force as the apostle’s word. For Isaiah says, “If you say, We trust in the Lord our God — now make a bargain with my lord the king of the Assyrians.” And he adds, “And now, was it without the Lord that we came up to this land to make war on it?” And Jonah, himself a prophet, points to the same thing in what he says. The ship’s captain came to him and said, “Why are you snoring? Get up, call on your God, so that he may save us and we may not be lost.” By “your God” he speaks as though to a man who knew God by way of knowledge; and “that God may save us” revealed what was in the minds of pagans who had turned their thought toward the Ruler of all but had not yet come to trust him. And the same book again — he said to them, “I am the servant of the Lord; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven.” And again the same book — they said, “Let us by no means be lost for the life of this man.” And Malachi the prophet plainly presents God saying, “I will not accept a sacrifice at your hands. For from the rising of the sun to its going down my name is glorified among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice is offered to me.” And again: “Because I am a great King, says the Lord Almighty, and my name is plain among the nations.” What name? The Son, declaring the Father among the Greeks who have believed.

In what follows Plato sets out that the choice is ours: “Virtue owns no master; and in proportion as each man honors or dishonors it, in that proportion he will have a share in it. The blame belongs to the one who chooses.” But God is blameless; for he is never the author of evil. “Warlike Trojans,” says the lyric poet:

And Pindar expressly brings in Zeus the Savior as well, the consort of Themis, proclaiming him King, Savior, and Just, in the following lines:

The man, then, who is not obedient to the truth, and is puffed up with human teaching, is wretched and pitiable, according to Euripides:

Let whoever wishes, then, come to the true instruction and learn from Parmenides the Eleatic, who promises:

And Metrodorus, though an Epicurean, spoke like a man inspired: “Remember, Menestratus, that being a mortal with a life bounded on every side, you have gone up in your soul until you have seen endless time and the infinity of things, and what is to come and what has been.” So it will be when, with the blessed chorus, as Plato says, we shall gaze on the blessed sight and vision — we following with Zeus, and others with other gods, if we may be allowed to say so — and be initiated into the most blessed mystery; which we shall celebrate ourselves, made whole and untroubled by the ills that were waiting for us at the end of our time, brought in to the knowledge of whole and untroubled sights, and looking at them in pure sunlight; ourselves pure, and no longer marked out by the thing that we carry about and call the body, bound to it as an oyster is bound to its shell.

The Pythagoreans call heaven the Antichthon, the counter-Earth. And of this land it is said by Jeremiah, “I will set you among the children, and give you the chosen land as an inheritance from God Almighty”; and those who inherit it shall reign over the earth. Countless examples crowd into my mind that I might bring forward. But for the sake of proportion the discussion must stop here, so that we do not act out the saying of Agathon the tragedian:

It has now been shown clearly, I think, in what way we are to understand the Lord’s calling the Greeks thieves, and I gladly leave the teachings of the philosophers behind. If we were to go over their sayings, we should at once pile up such a quantity of notes in showing that the whole of Greek wisdom came out of the barbarian philosophy. Still, we shall touch on this line of thought again, as need requires, when we collect the opinions current among the Greeks about first principles. But from what has been said it quietly falls to us to consider in what way the Greek books are to be read by the man who is able to get through the surf in them. So:

as it stands according to Empedocles,

He showed in a godly way that knowledge and ignorance are the boundaries of happiness and misery. “For men who love wisdom must be well acquainted with a great many things,” according to Heraclitus; and truly it must be that

It is now clear to us, from what has been said, that God’s kindness has no end, and that from a beginningless first principle an equal natural righteousness reached all, according to the worth of each several race — never having had a beginning. For God did not begin to be Lord and Good; he is always what he is. Nor will he ever stop doing good, even though he brings all things to an end. And each one of us shares in his kindness as far as he wills. For the difference among the chosen is made by the coming in of a choice worthy of the soul, and by practice. So let our fifth book of Miscellanies — notes for the one who truly knows, in keeping with the true philosophy — be brought to a close.