Notes Scattered Like a Meadow

The sixth book of these patchwork notes on knowledge, and the seventh with it, keep to the true philosophy. Once they have sketched out as well as they can the argument about conduct that runs through them, and have shown what the one who truly knows is like in the way he lives, they go on to show the philosophers that he is in no way irreligious, as they suppose, but that he alone is truly religious — setting out in brief the form his religion takes, so far as it is safe to commit such a thing to writing in a book meant for reference. For the Lord gave the command, “Work for the food that lasts to eternal life.” And the prophet says, “Blessed is the one who sows beside all waters, where the ox and the donkey tread” — that is, the people gathered into one faith out of the Law and out of the nations. And, as the noble apostle says, “The weak person eats vegetables.” [a]

The Instructor, which I divided into three books, has already set out the training and the feeding that begin in childhood — the way of life that starts from elementary teaching and grows by faith — and for those now enrolled among grown men it prepares the soul beforehand, furnished with virtue, to receive knowledge. The Greeks, then, will learn plainly from what is said in these pages that in godlessly persecuting the man who loves God, it is they themselves who are ungodly. Then, as the notes go forward in the patchwork manner, we must clear up the difficulties raised about the coming of the Lord, both by Greeks and by those who are not Greeks.

In a meadow the flowers bloom all mixed together, and in a walled orchard the fruit trees are not kept apart by species from trees of another kind. If some men, then, culling varieties, have put together learned collections — Meadows, and Heliconian Anthologies, and Honeycombs, and Robes — these notes of mine are made of whatever comes back to memory at random, refined neither in arrangement nor in wording but scattered on purpose; and so the patchwork form is mixed and many-colored, like a meadow. That being so, my notes will serve as sparks for kindling a fire. If a man fit for knowledge should happen on them, the search he makes with effort will turn to his profit and advantage. For work ought to come before food, and much more before knowledge, in the case of those who are on their way to the eternal and blessed salvation by the “narrow and hard road,” which is truly the Lord’s.

Our knowledge, and our spiritual orchard, is the Savior himself. We are planted into him, moved and transplanted out of our old life into good soil. And transplanting is what makes a tree bear. So the Lord, into whom we have been transplanted, is the Light and the true Knowledge.

Now knowledge is spoken of in two senses. There is what is ordinarily called knowledge, which shows up in everyone — and the same goes for “comprehension” and “apprehension” — the general knowing of particular objects, in which not only the reasoning powers share but the unreasoning ones just as much. That I would never call knowledge at all, since taking things in through the senses comes by nature. But what is called knowledge in the full sense of the word carries the stamp of judgment and reason. In it there will be acts of knowing that are rational and nothing else, bearing purely on the things the mind alone can reach, and coming out of the sheer working of the soul. “A good man,” says David, “shows mercy” — to those ruined by going wrong — “and lends,” passing on the word of truth, and not at random, “for he will manage his words with judgment”: with careful reckoning, “he has scattered abroad, he has given to the poor.”