Every Teacher Has a Teacher

As I pointed out long ago, what I have set myself to discuss is not the course of study that holds good in each school, but what philosophy really is: wisdom rightly ordered, which furnishes an acquaintance with the things that belong to life. And we define wisdom as sure knowledge — a firm and unshakable grasp of things divine and human, taking in the present, the past and the future, which the Lord has taught us both by his coming and through the prophets. It cannot be overturned by argument, since it was handed over to us; and so it is wholly true, in line with God’s own intention, being known through the Son. In one respect it is everlasting; in another it becomes useful within time. In part it is one and the same, in part many and a matter of indifference; in part free of any stirring of feeling, in part full of longing; in part complete, in part unfinished. [a]

This wisdom, then — soundness of soul and of reason, and a clean life — is what philosophy longs for. Philosophy is kindly disposed toward wisdom and in love with it, and does everything to reach it. Among us, the ones called philosophers are those who love Wisdom, the Maker and Teacher of all things — that is, the knowledge of the Son of God. Among the Greeks they are the men who take up arguments about virtue. Philosophy, then, is made up of whatever teachings in each school — I mean the schools of philosophy — cannot be refuted, together with a life to match, all gathered into one selection. And these were stolen from the God-given grace of the foreigners and then dressed up in Greek speech. Some of it they borrowed; some of it they misunderstood. Some things they said out of being stirred, and never worked them out fully; other things came by human guesswork and reasoning, and there they trip. They think they have hit the truth exactly; as we understand them, they have hit it only in part. So they know nothing beyond this world.

It is like geometry, which handles measures and sizes and shapes by drawing them on flat surfaces; and like painting, which in a painted scene seems to take in the whole field of view. But by the rules of the art it gives a false report of what is there, working with the marks that follow from how the lines of sight fall. By that means the high points of the view are kept, and the low, and the ones between; some objects seem to stand in the foreground, others in the background, and others somewhere else again — all on a smooth and level surface. In the same way the philosophers copy the truth, the way a painting does. And in every one of them, love of self is the cause of all their mistakes. So a man should not be driven by love of self, wanting the kind of glory that stops with people; he should love God and become truly holy, with wisdom.

If a man takes what is partial for what is whole, and treats a servant as the Lord, he misses the truth. He has not understood what David said by way of confession: “I have eaten earth like bread.” Love of self and a high opinion of oneself are, in David’s view, earth, and going astray.

But if that is so, then learning and knowledge come by being taught; and if there is teaching, you must look for the teacher. Cleanthes claims Zeno, Metrodorus claims Epicurus, Theophrastus claims Aristotle, and Plato claims Socrates. But when I come to Pythagoras and Pherecydes and Thales and the first wise men, my search for their teacher comes to a halt. If you name the Egyptians, the Indians, the Babylonians and the Magi themselves, I will still not stop asking who taught them. So I lead you up to the first generation of human beings, and from there I begin to ask who their teacher was. No human being — they had not yet learned anything themselves. Nor any of the angels either. Human beings do not hear the way angels speak as angels; angels have no tongue to answer to our ears; and no one would credit angels with the organs of speech — lips, I mean, and what lies next to them, the throat and the windpipe and the chest, breath and air set vibrating. And God, in his unapproachable holiness, is far from calling aloud; he is set apart even from the archangels.

We have already heard, too, that the angels learned the truth, and the rulers set over them as well; for they had a beginning. So it remains for us to go on up and look for their teacher. And since the one who had no beginning is one — God the Almighty — the Firstborn is one too, “through whom all things were made, and without whom not one thing was made that has been made.” “For God is truly one, who made the beginning of all things” — pointing to “the firstborn Son.” So Peter writes, having grasped exactly what is meant by “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.” And all the prophets call him Wisdom. He is the Teacher of everything that was made, the fellow counselor of God, who knew all things beforehand; and from above, from the first laying of the world’s foundation, “in many ways and at many times,” he trains and brings to completion. That is why it is rightly said, “Call no one on earth your teacher.”

You see, then, where the true philosophy gets its starting points — even though the Law is the image and shadow of the truth; for the Law is the shadow of the truth. But the Greeks’ love of self proclaims certain men as their teachers. Just as the whole family traces back to God the Creator, so all teaching of good things, the teaching that makes people righteous, traces back to the Lord, and leads and contributes to him.

But if they received seeds of the truth in any way at all, from any creature, they did not feed them. They committed them to barren, rainless ground and let weeds choke them — the way the Pharisees broke away from the Law by bringing in human teachings. The cause of all this is not the Teacher but the men who choose not to obey. Those among them, though, who believed in the Lord’s coming and in the plain teaching of the Scriptures do arrive at the knowledge of the Law; and in the same way those given to philosophy are brought, by the Lord’s teaching, into the knowledge of the true philosophy. “For the sayings of the Lord are pure sayings, refined in fire, tested in earth, purified seven times.”

As silver is refined again and again, so the righteous man is put to the test, becoming the Lord’s coin and taking the king’s image. Or again: since Solomon calls “the tongue of the righteous man gold that has been through the fire,” he is hinting that teaching which has been tested and is wise deserves praise and welcome, once it has been well tried by earth — that is, when the soul that truly knows is made holy in many ways by pulling back from earthly fires. And the body it lives in is cleansed, made over to the purity of a holy temple. The first cleansing that happens in the body — the soul coming first — is keeping away from evil things. Some take that for completeness, and it truly is the completeness of the ordinary believer, Jew or Greek. But in the one who truly knows, after what counts as completeness in others, his righteousness moves on to active well-doing. And in whoever the heightening of righteousness advances to the doing of good, in him completeness rests in the settled habit of doing good, in the likeness of God. For those who are Abraham’s offspring, and beyond that servants of God, are “the called”; and the sons of Jacob are the chosen — the men who have tripped up the working of wickedness.

If, then, we say that Christ himself is Wisdom, and that it was his working that showed itself in the prophets — the working by which the tradition of knowledge can be learned, as he himself taught the apostles while he was present among them — then it follows that knowledge is wisdom: knowledge being the knowing and grasp of things present, future and past, sure and dependable, since it was handed over and uncovered by the Son of God. And if the goal of the wise man is contemplation, then the goal of those who are still only philosophers aims at it but never reaches it, unless through learning it takes in the prophetic word that has been made known — the word by which it lays hold of the present, the future and the past, how they are, were and will be. And this knowledge is what has come down by handing on to a few, given unwritten by the apostles. So knowledge, or wisdom, ought to be practiced until it becomes the everlasting and unchanging habit of contemplation.

Paul too, in his letters, plainly does not run philosophy down. He only judges it beneath a man who has risen to the height of true knowledge to go back to the Greek “philosophy,” which he calls, in a figure, “the elements of this world,” since it is the most elementary thing there is and a preparatory training for the truth. That is why, writing to the Hebrews, who were sliding back from faith to the Law, he says: “Do you not need someone to teach you all over again the first elements of the words of God? You have come to need milk, and not solid food.” And so also to the Colossians, who had come over from Greek life: “See that no one carries you off by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elements of this world, and not according to Christ” — since they were being coaxed back to philosophy, the elementary teaching. [o]

And if someone says that the Greeks discovered philosophy by human understanding, even so I find the Scriptures saying that understanding is sent by God. The psalmist counts understanding the greatest free gift, and begs for it: “I am your servant; give me understanding.” And does not David, asking for wide experience of knowledge, write, “Teach me gentleness and discipline and knowledge, for I have believed in your commands”? He acknowledged that the covenants carry the highest authority, and that they were given to those who excel. So the psalm says again of God, “He has not done so for any nation, and he has not shown them his judgments.” The words “he has not done so” show that he has done something, only not “so.” The “so,” then, is comparative, and points to the greater thing that is ours. The prophet could have said simply “he has not done,” without the “so.”

Further, Peter says in Acts: “In truth I see that God shows no partiality; in every nation the one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”

God’s freedom from partiality, then, does not belong to a moment in time but is from everlasting. His generosity had no beginning, and it is not shut up to particular places or people; his generosity is not doled out in portions. “Open to me the gates of righteousness,” it is said; “I will go in through them and give thanks to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord; the righteous will go in by it.” Explaining the prophet’s words, Barnabas adds: “Many gates stand open, but the one that is in righteousness is the gate that is in Christ, and all who go in by it are blessed.” Close to the same meaning is this word of the prophet: “The Lord is upon many waters” — meaning not only the different covenants, but the ways of teaching, those among the Greeks and those among foreigners, that lead toward righteousness. And David, plainly bearing witness to the truth, sings, “Let sinners be turned back into Hades, and all the nations that forget God.” Clearly they forget the one they once remembered, and dismiss the one they knew before they forgot him. So there was a dim knowledge of God among the nations too. That is enough on those points.

Now the one who truly knows must be well-read. And since the Greeks say that Protagoras led the way in inventing the setting of one argument against another, something should be said about arguments of that sort. For Scripture says, “The man who says much will hear much in return.” And who will understand a parable of the Lord but the wise, the intelligent, and the one who loves his Lord? Let such a man be trustworthy; let him be able to put his knowledge into words; let him be shrewd in telling one word from another; let him be quick in action; let him be pure. “The greater he seems to be, the more humble he ought to be,” says Clement in his letter to the Corinthians — a man of the sort able to keep the rule, “Snatch some out of the fire, and on others have mercy, making a distinction.”

The pruning hook is made chiefly for pruning, of course. But with it we also part twigs that have grown tangled together, and cut the thorns that come up among the vines and are not easy to reach. All of that has to do with pruning. In the same way a human being is made chiefly for the knowledge of God; but he also measures land, farms, and does philosophy. Of these pursuits one serves life, another living well, and a third the study of things that can be proved. And let those who say that philosophy took its rise from the devil know this: Scripture says that “the devil is transformed into an angel of light.” About to do what? Plainly, about to prophesy. But if he prophesies as an angel of light, he will say what is true. And if what he prophesies is angelic and belongs to the light, then what he prophesies is useful, since he has been changed into the likeness of the work — though he is other than it in the matter of his revolt. For how could he deceive anyone without first drawing the lover of knowledge into partnership and only afterwards dragging him into falsehood? Above all he will be found to know the truth — if not so as to take it in fully, at least well enough not to be a stranger to it.

Philosophy, then, is not false, even though the thief and the liar speak truth by a change in the way they work. And no verdict of condemnation is to be passed blindly on what is said because of the man who says it — a point worth keeping in mind about the people now said to prophesy. What is said must be examined, to see whether it holds to the truth. Speaking generally, we shall not be wrong in saying that everything necessary and useful for life came to us from God, and that philosophy in particular was given to the Greeks as a covenant of their own — being, as it is, a stepping stone to the philosophy that is according to Christ — even though the men who gave themselves to Greek philosophy shut their ears to the truth on purpose. They looked down on the voice of foreigners, or else they feared the danger the laws of the state hung over a believer.

And as in the foreign philosophy, so in the Greek, “weeds were sown” by the farmer whose own crop is weeds. That is how sects grew up among us as well, alongside the wheat that bears. And those who in Greek philosophy preach the irreverence and pleasure-seeking of Epicurus, and whatever other opinions are spread about against right reason, exist among the Greeks as the bastard fruit of a farming God gave. This pleasure-loving, self-serving philosophy is what the apostle calls “the wisdom of this world,” because it teaches the things of this world and about this world only, and because it is therefore subject, so far as authority goes, to the men who rule here. That is why this piecemeal philosophy is very elementary, while knowledge that is truly complete deals with objects grasped by the mind, which lie beyond the sphere of the world, and with things more spiritual still than those which “eye did not see and ear did not hear, and which did not come up into the heart of man” — until the Teacher gave us the account of them, drawing back the veil of the holy of holies, and then, higher again, of things holier still, for those who are truly and not falsely heirs of the Lord’s adoption.

For we now dare to say — and here is the faith that knows — that such a man knows all things and grasps all things in a sure hold, in matters that are hard for us and that really belong to true knowledge: men such as James, Peter, John, Paul and the rest of the apostles. For prophecy is full of knowledge, since it was given by the Lord and then explained by the Lord to the apostles. And is knowledge not a property of the reasoning soul, which trains itself for exactly this, that by knowledge it may be counted worthy of immortality? Both are powers of the soul, knowledge and impulse. And impulse turns out to be a movement that follows an act of assent. A man who has an impulse toward an action first takes in the knowledge of the action, and second the impulse. Let us give this a little more attention. Since learning is older than action — for in the nature of things a man who does what he wants to do learns it first; knowledge comes from learning, and impulse follows knowledge, and after that comes action — knowledge turns out to be the beginning and the author of every reasoned act. So it is right that this alone marks out what belongs properly to the reasoning soul; for in fact impulse, like knowledge, is stirred by things that exist. And knowledge is, in its own nature, the soul’s contemplation of things that exist — of some one thing, or of certain things, and, when it is complete, of them all together. Some say, though, that the wise man is convinced there are things that cannot be grasped, and that he has a kind of grasp of them all the same, in that he grasps that what cannot be grasped cannot be grasped. That is a commonplace, and it belongs to men able to perceive very little; for such a man is asserting that there are things that cannot be grasped.

But the man who truly knows, the one I am speaking of, grasps for himself what seems ungraspable to others, believing that nothing is beyond the grasp of the Son of God, and therefore that nothing is beyond teaching. For the one who suffered out of love for us would have held back no part of the knowledge we need for our training. So this faith becomes sure proof, since truth follows what God has handed over. But if a man wants wide experience: “he knows things of old and guesses at things to come; he understands the twists of speeches and the solving of riddles; he foreknows signs and wonders, and how seasons and times will come out.”