Grafting the Wild Olive

The one who truly knows, then, is stamped with the closest likeness there is — the mind of the Teacher. The Teacher had that mind, and he commanded it and commended it to his disciples and to the thoughtful. Taking it in as the one who taught it meant him to, and receiving it in its full greatness, he teaches worthily “on the housetops” those who can be built up to a height, and he begins doing what he says, with his own life as the pattern. For what was commanded is possible to do. And in truth the kingly man, the Christian, ought to be ruler and leader. We are commanded to be lords not only over the wild beasts outside us, but over the wild passions inside us as well. [a]

So it is by knowing the bad life and the good, it seems, that the one who truly knows is saved: he understands, and carries out, “more than the scribes and Pharisees.” David writes: “Bend your bow, and go on prospering, and reign, for the sake of truth and gentleness and righteousness; and your right hand will guide you wonderfully” — that is, the right hand is the Lord. “Who is wise? He will understand these things. Who is discerning? He will know them. For the ways of the Lord are straight,” says the prophet, showing that only the one who truly knows can understand what the Spirit has said in a hidden way, and explain it. “And the one who understands will keep quiet at that time,” says the Scripture — keep quiet, plainly, about declaring such things to people unworthy of them. For the Lord says, “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear,” declaring that hearing and understanding do not belong to everyone.

To the point, David writes: “Dark water is in the clouds of the air. At the flash before him the clouds passed by, hail and coals of fire” — showing that the holy words are hidden. He is hinting that to those who truly know they come down from God clear and shining, like hail that does no harm; but that to the crowd they are dark, like coals pulled dead out of a fire, which give off neither flame nor light unless they are lit and set burning. “The Lord, then, gives me the tongue of instruction,” it says, “so that I may know when it is the season to speak a word” — and not by way of testimony alone, but by question and answer as well. “And the instruction of the Lord opens my mouth.” So it belongs to the one who truly knows to understand how to use speech, and when, and how, and to whom. And the apostle, in saying “according to the elements of the world, and not according to Christ,” is stating that the Greek teaching is elementary and Christ’s is complete, as we have suggested before.

“The wild olive is grafted into the richness of the olive” — and it is in fact the same kind of tree as the cultivated olives. For the graft uses the tree it is set into as its soil. All plants sprang up at the same time, at the divine command. That is why the wild olive, wild as it is, crowns the winners at Olympia. And the elm teaches the vine to bear fruit, by carrying it up to a height. Now we see that wild trees draw in more nourishment, because they cannot ripen it; wild trees, therefore, have less power of working it up than cultivated ones do, and the lack of that power is the cause of their wildness. So the grafted olive gets more nourishment by growing in the wild one, and it becomes used, as it were, to working that nourishment up, and in that way grows into the likeness of the cultivated tree’s richness.

The philosopher is like the wild olive in the same way. He has much in him undigested, because he is given to searching, quick to follow, and eager to seize the richness of the truth. But suppose he also receives the divine power, through faith. Then he is transplanted into that good and gentle knowledge, grafted like a wild olive into the Word who is truly beautiful and merciful; and he works up the nourishment that is supplied to him, and becomes a fine and good olive tree. For grafting makes worthless shoots noble, and forces the barren to bear, by the gardener’s art and by the skill that comes of knowing.

Grafting, they say, is done in four ways. In the first, the graft has to be fitted in between the wood and the bark. That is like the way we teach ordinary people from the nations, who take the word in only at the surface. In the second, the wood is split and the cultivated branch is set into the cleft. This fits people who have studied philosophy: cut through their settled opinions, and the acknowledgment of the truth is produced in them. It fits the Jews too — open up the old covenant, and the new and noble olive shoot is set in. The third kind of grafting fits country people and members of the sects, who are brought to the truth by force: both shoots are pared down with a sharp pruning knife until the pith lies bare but is not wounded, and then the two are bound together.

The fourth is the kind of grafting called budding. An eye is cut out of the trunk of a good variety, with a circle of bark cut around it about three inches across. Then the stock is stripped to match the eye over an equal circumference. And so the graft is set in, bound round, and sealed with clay, the bud being kept undamaged and unstained. This is the manner of the teaching that belongs to knowledge, which is able to look into things themselves. And in practice this method serves best with trees already cultivated. The “grafting into the good olive” that the apostle mentions may be grafting into Christ himself, the uncultivated and unbelieving nature being transplanted into Christ — that is, in the case of those who come to trust in Christ. But it is better taken of the grafting of each person’s faith into the soul itself. For the Holy Spirit too is in some such way transplanted by distribution, according to the limited capacity of each, without being limited himself.

Discussing knowledge, Solomon speaks like this: “Wisdom is radiant and never fades, and she is easily seen by those who love her. She is ahead of them, making herself known to those who desire her. Whoever rises early for her will not have to toil. To think about her is good sense brought to its full growth, and whoever keeps watch for her will soon be free of worry. For she goes about, herself looking for those worthy of her (knowledge does not belong to everyone), and on every road she kindly shows herself to them.” Now the roads are the ways people live, and the variety there is among the covenants. Presently he adds, “and in every thought she meets them,” being contemplated in various ways, that is, through every kind of training. Then he brings in love, which completes the argument by chains of reasoning from true premises, and so draws a conclusion both convincing and true: “The beginning of her is the truest desire for instruction” — that is, for knowledge — “and concern for instruction is love, and love is the keeping of her laws, and attention to her laws is the guarantee of immortality, and immortality brings one near to God. The desire for wisdom, then, leads to a kingdom.”

What he teaches, I think, is this: true instruction is the desire for knowledge; instruction put into practice produces love of knowledge; love is the keeping of the commands that lead to knowledge; and keeping them makes the commands stand firm, and out of that comes immortality. “And immortality brings us near to God.”

If, then, the love of knowledge produces immortality, and brings the kingly man near to God the King, knowledge ought to be sought until it is found. Seeking is an effort to lay hold of something, and it finds its object by means of certain signs. Finding is the end and the stopping of the search, when the thing sought is now in hand. And this is knowledge. This finding, properly so called, is knowledge — the laying hold of what was looked for. And they say that a proof is either what comes before, or what goes along with, or what follows after. So the finding of what is sought about God is the teaching that comes through the Son; and the proof that our Savior is himself the Son of God is the prophecies that came before his coming and announced him, and the testimonies about him that went along with his birth into the world, and on top of these the acts of power proclaimed and shown openly after he was taken up.

The proof that the truth is with us is the fact that the Son of God himself has taught us. For if in every inquiry there are these two general things, a person and a matter, then what is truly the truth is shown to be in our hands alone. The Son of God is the person of the truth that is set out, and the matter is the power of faith, which holds out against every opponent there is and against the assault of the whole world.

But since this stands established, as everyone admits, by facts and arguments that do not pass away, and since anyone who thinks there is no providence has already been shown to deserve punishment rather than argument, and is godless in the true sense, our aim is to find out what we must do, and how we must live, to arrive at the knowledge of God who is over all — and how, by honoring what is divine, we may become the authors of our own salvation. Knowing and learning what pleases him, not from the sophists but from God himself, we try to do what is just and holy. And it pleases him that we should be saved; and salvation comes about through doing good and through knowledge together, and the Lord is the teacher of both. If, then, according to Plato, it is only possible to learn the truth either from God or from God’s offspring, we have good reason, choosing our testimonies out of the divine oracles, to boast that we learn the truth from the Son of God — prophesied at first, and then explained.

Still, the things that work along with us in the discovery of truth are not to be thrown away. Philosophy announces a providence, and a reward for a life of happiness, and, on the other hand, punishment for a life of misery; so it teaches about God in outline. But it does not keep accuracy in the particulars. About the Son of God, and about the way providence orders things, it does not speak as we do — for it did not know how God is to be worshiped. That is why the sects within the non-Greek philosophy, though they speak of one God and sing the praises of Christ, speak without accuracy and not in accordance with truth: they find another God, and they receive Christ in a way the prophecies do not hand down. Their false teachings stand against the way of life that follows the truth, and so they stand against us.

Paul, for instance, circumcised Timothy on account of the Jews who had believed, so that those who had been trained under the law would not desert the faith because he broke points of the law that they still understood in a fleshly way — and he knew perfectly well that circumcision is not what counts a man righteous. He declared that he became “all things to all men” by fitting in with them, while keeping hold of the essentials of the teaching, “so that he might win them all.” And Daniel, under the king of the Persians, wore “the chain,” without despising the afflictions of his people.

So the real liars are not those who fit in with others for the sake of the plan of salvation, nor those who go wrong on small points, but those who are wrong on essentials, who reject the Lord and, so far as it lies in them, rob the Lord of the true teaching. They do not cite the Scriptures, or hand them on, in a way worthy of God and of the Lord. For the deposit given back to God, according to the Lord’s teaching delivered through his apostles, is the understanding and the practice of the godly tradition. “And what you hear in the ear” — that is, in a hidden way and in a mystery, for such things are said figuratively to be spoken in the ear — “proclaim,” he says, “on the housetops”: taking them in a lofty sense, delivering them in a lofty way, and explaining the Scriptures by the rule of the truth. For neither prophecy nor the Savior himself announced the divine mysteries so plainly that just anyone could take them in; they put them in parables. The apostles accordingly say of the Lord that “he spoke all these things in parables, and without a parable he said nothing to them”; and if “all things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be that has come to be,” then prophecy and the law were also through him, and were spoken by him in parables. “But all things are straight,” says the Scripture, “before those who understand” — that is, before those who take in and hold to the explanation of the Scriptures that he gave, according to the rule of the church. And the rule of the church is the agreement and harmony of the law and the prophets with the covenant handed down at the coming of the Lord.

Knowledge is followed by practical wisdom, and practical wisdom by self-control. For one may say that practical wisdom is divine knowledge, and belongs to those who are being made gods, while self-control is mortal, and belongs to those who pursue philosophy and are not yet wise. If virtue is divine, so too is the knowledge of it; whereas self-control is a kind of unfinished wisdom, reaching after wisdom, working hard at it, and not contemplating. And just as certainly righteousness, being human and something everyone shares, ranks below holiness, which exists by the righteousness that is divine. For the righteousness of the man made perfect does not rest on civil contracts or on the prohibitions of law; it flows from his own free action and from his love toward God.

There are many reasons, then, why the Scriptures hide their meaning. First, so that we will become inquisitive and stay on the watch for the discovery of the words of salvation. Then, because it was not fitting for everyone to understand, so that they would not be harmed by taking in a different sense the things the Holy Spirit declared for salvation. That is why the holy mysteries of the prophecies are veiled in the parables, kept for chosen men, picked out for knowledge because of their faith; for the manner of the Scriptures is the manner of parable. And that is why the Lord, who was not of the world, came to men as one who was of the world. He was clothed with every virtue, and his aim was to lead man, the world’s foster-child, up to the things the mind grasps and to the most essential truths, by knowledge, out of one world into another.

That is why he also used description by metaphor; for that is what a parable is — a telling that starts from some subject which is not the principal subject but resembles it, and leads whoever understands to what is true and principal. Or, as some say, a way of speaking that sets out the principal subject forcefully by means of other circumstances. And even now the whole ordering of things that prophesied of the Lord looks like a parable to people who do not know the truth — when one man speaks and the rest hear that the Son of God, of the God who made the universe, took flesh and was conceived in the virgin’s womb (this is how his material body came to be), and afterward, as in fact happened, suffered and rose again. It is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks,” as the apostle says.

But when the Scriptures are opened up and tell the truth to those who have ears, they proclaim that this very suffering, endured by the flesh the Lord took on, is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” And finally, since the parable style of Scripture is the most ancient of all, as we have shown, it was thickest, as you would expect, in the prophets, so that the Holy Spirit might show that the philosophers among the Greeks, and the wise men among those who are not Greeks besides, did not know of the Lord’s coming, nor of the mysterious teaching that was to be delivered by him. So prophecy did right: in proclaiming the Lord, it was saying what lay beyond the ideas of the crowd, and, so as not to seem to some people to speak against God, it put its declarations in expressions that could lead to other conceptions. Now all the prophets who foretold the Lord’s coming and the holy mysteries that went with it were persecuted and killed — and so was the Lord himself, who opened the Scriptures to them; and his disciples, who preached the word as he did, staked their lives after him.

That is why Peter, in his Preaching, says this of the apostles: “But we unrolled the books of the prophets that we have, which name Jesus Christ — partly in parables, partly in riddles, partly plainly and in so many words — and we found his coming, and his death, and the cross, and all the rest of the tortures the Jews inflicted on him, and his resurrection and his being taken up into the heavens before Jerusalem was captured. As it is written: all these things he had to suffer, and what would come after him. Recognizing them, therefore, we came to trust God because of what is written about him.” And a little later he draws the conclusion that the Scriptures owe their origin to the divine providence, putting it this way: “For we know that God really did enjoin these things, and we say nothing apart from the Scripture.”

Now the Hebrew dialect, like all the rest, has certain features of its own: a manner of speech that displays the character of the nation. A dialect is accordingly defined as a manner of speech produced by a nation’s character. But prophecy is not marked out by such dialects. For in the Greek writings what are called changes of figure produce obscurity on purpose, worked up after the manner of our prophecies. And this is done by the deliberate turning aside from straight speech that takes place in verse or in offhand prose. A figure, then, is a form of speech carried over from the literal to what is not literal, for the sake of the composition, and on account of a wording that is useful in speech.

Prophecy, though, does not use figures in its expressions for the sake of beautiful wording. Rather, because the truth does not belong to everyone, it is veiled in many ways, and it makes the light rise only on those who are initiated into knowledge and who seek the truth out of love. In the philosophy of those who are not Greeks the proverb is called a manner of prophecy, and so is the parable, and the riddle besides. They are also called “wisdom”; and again, as something distinct from it, “instruction and words of understanding,” and “twists of words,” and “true righteousness”; and again, “teaching that sets judgment straight,” and “shrewdness for the simple,” which comes of training, “and perception and thought,” with which the young learner under instruction is filled. “Whoever hears these prophets, being wise, will be wiser; and the intelligent man will acquire guidance, and will understand a parable and a dark saying, the words of the wise and their riddles.”

And if it is the case that the Greek dialects got their name from Hellen, the son of Zeus who was surnamed Deucalion, then, from the chronology we have already set out, it is easy enough to see by how many generations the dialects in use among the Greeks come after the language of the Hebrews. But as the work goes on, we shall in each part take up the figures of speech named above by the prophet, and exhibit the way of life that belongs to knowledge, showing it in order according to the rule of the truth.

And did not the Power that appeared to Hermas in the Vision, in the form of the Church, hand him a book to copy out, which she wanted made known to the chosen? He says he copied it letter by letter, without finding how to make out the syllables. And this signified that the Scripture is clear to everyone when it is taken by the bare reading, and that this is the faith which stands in the place of the first elements. That is why the figure of “reading letter by letter” is used, while we understand that the unfolding of the Scriptures by knowledge, when faith has already come a long way, is like reading by syllables.

Again, Isaiah the prophet is ordered to take “a new book and write in it” certain things: the Spirit prophesying that through the explanation of the Scriptures there would come afterward the sacred knowledge, which at that time was still unwritten, because it was not yet known. For from the beginning it was spoken only to those who understand. And now that the Savior has taught the apostles, the unwritten rendering of the written Scripture has been handed down to us as well, inscribed by the power of God on hearts that are new, to match the newness of the book.

So it is that those of highest repute among the Greeks dedicate the fruit of the pomegranate to Hermes, who they say is speech, because it has to be interpreted; for speech conceals much. And rightly, therefore, Joshua the son of Nun saw Moses double when Moses was taken up: one Moses with the angels, and one on the mountains, honored with burial in their ravines. Joshua saw this sight from below, lifted up by the Spirit, and Caleb with him. But the two did not see alike. The one came down faster, as though the weight he carried were great; the other came down after him, and then reported the glory he had beheld, being able to make out more than the first, since he had grown purer. The story shows, in my opinion, that knowledge is not everyone’s privilege. For some look at the body of the Scriptures — the expressions and the names — as at the body of Moses; while others see through to the thoughts and to what is signified by the names, looking for the Moses who is with the angels.

Many of those who called out to the Lord said, “Son of David, have mercy on me.” A few knew him as the Son of God — Peter, for instance, whom he pronounced blessed, “for flesh and blood did not reveal the truth to him, but his Father in heaven” — showing that the one who truly knows recognizes the Son of the Almighty not by the flesh conceived in the womb, but by the Father’s own power. So the getting of the truth is hard, and not only for those who read in a simple way. Even for those whose privilege the knowledge of the truth is, the contemplation of it is not granted all at once. The history of Moses teaches this: we must first grow accustomed to gazing — as the Hebrews grew accustomed to the glory on Moses’ face, and the prophets of Israel to the sight of angels — until we too become able to look the splendors of truth in the face.