The Helm of the Universe

It is time now to show the Greeks that the one who truly knows is the only genuinely religious man. Then the philosophers, once they have learned what sort of person the true Christian is, may condemn their own stupidity: they persecute the name of Christian rashly and without thinking it through, and they call people irreligious who actually know the true God. And with philosophers, I reckon, the arguments had better be clearer ones, so that out of the practice their own training has already given them they may be able to follow — even though they have not yet shown themselves worthy to share in the power of believing. [a]

For the moment I will not bring in the sayings of the prophets, since I mean to draw on the Scriptures later, in their proper places. Instead I will point out in summary what those sayings indicate, as I sketch out what Christianity is — so that by taking up the Scriptures at once, especially as the Greeks do not yet understand what the Scriptures say, I may not break the thread of the argument. Once the points have been indicated, proofs will be produced in abundance for those who have believed. And if what we say strikes some of the crowd as different from the Lord’s Scriptures, let them know that it is from that source that our statements have their breath and their life. Taking their start from the Scriptures, they claim to give the sense only, not the words. A fuller treatment, out of season here, would rightly look like padding; and yet not to look at what is pressing would be sheer laziness and a real failure. And “blessed indeed are those who search out the testimonies of the Lord; they will seek him with their whole heart.” The law and the prophets bear witness about the Lord.

So this is our aim: to prove that the one who truly knows is the only holy and religious man, and that he worships the true God in a way worthy of him; and that worship fit for God is followed by loving God and being loved by God. Accordingly he judges every excellent thing to be honorable according to its worth. Among the objects our senses take in, he judges that we are to esteem rulers, and parents, and everyone advanced in years; among subjects of instruction, the most ancient philosophy and the earliest prophecy; and among the things the mind alone reaches, what is oldest in origin — the First Principle and Beginning of everything that exists, outside of time and without an origin: the Son.

From him we are to learn the Cause further back, the Father of the universe, the most ancient and the most generous of all. He cannot be put into speech. He is to be revered with reverence and silence and holy wonder, and honored above everything else. The Lord declared him, as far as those who learned were able to take him in, and he was understood by those the Lord chose to acknowledge him — men “whose senses,” as the apostle says, “were trained by practice.”

The service that the one who truly knows renders to God, then, is his soul’s unbroken attention and its occupation with the Deity, in love that never leaves off. Of the service given to human beings, one kind aims at improving them and the other is a servant’s work. The medical art aims at improving the body, philosophy at improving the soul. A servant’s service is what children render to parents and subjects to rulers.

In the same way, in the church, the elders take charge of the work that aims at improvement and the deacons of the servant’s work. Angels serve God in both these ministries, in the management of earthly affairs. And the one who truly knows serves God himself, and sets out for people the plan of improvement, in the way he has been appointed to discipline them for their amendment. For only that man is religious who serves God rightly and blamelessly in human affairs. Just as the best care of plants is the care that brings the fruit to be produced and gathered in, by knowledge and skill in farming, so that people get the benefit of it, so the religion of the one who truly knows takes to itself the fruit of the people who have come to believe through him; and when a good many reach knowledge and are saved by it, his skill brings in the best harvest.

And since godliness is the settled habit that keeps whatever befits God, the godly man is the only lover of God. That will be the man who knows what befits God, both in the matter of knowledge and in the life he must live, since he is destined to be divine and is already being made like God. So first of all he is a lover of God. For as the man who honors his father is a lover of his father, so the man who honors God is a lover of God.

It also seems to me, then, that the power of knowledge has three results: the knowledge of things; second, the doing of whatever the Word suggests; and third, the ability to hand on, in a way fit for God, the secrets that lie veiled inside the truth.

So how can a man be an atheist when he is convinced that God is all-powerful and has learned the divine mysteries from his only Son? An atheist is a man who thinks God does not exist. A superstitious man is one who dreads the demons, who makes gods of everything, wood and stone alike, and who enslaves spirit — and a human being, who has the life of reason in him.

To know God, then, is the first step of faith; the next is to be sure, through confidence in the Savior’s teaching, that doing wrong in any way at all does not go with the knowledge of God. So the best thing on earth is the most religious man, and the best thing in heaven — nearer in place and purer — is an angel, who shares the eternal and blessed life. But the nature of the Son, which is nearest to the one who alone is Almighty, is the most perfect, the most holy, the most powerful, the most princely, the most kingly, the most generous. This is the highest excellence: it arranges everything in line with the Father’s will, and holds the helm of the universe in the best way, with power that never tires and never flags, working in everything it works in with its hidden purposes in view. [h]

For seen from his own side the Son of God is never shifted out of his place. He is not divided, not cut off, not passing from one place to another. He is always everywhere and contained nowhere: complete mind, the complete light of the Father, all eyes, seeing everything, hearing everything, knowing everything, scrutinizing the powers by his own power. To him the whole army of angels and gods is put in subjection. He is the Father’s Word, holding the holy administration in trust for the one who put everything in subjection under him.

That is why all people are his — some through knowledge, others not yet; some as friends, some as faithful servants, some as servants and nothing more. He is the Teacher, who trains the one who truly knows by mysteries, the believer by good hopes, and the hard of heart by corrective discipline that works through what the senses feel. So his providence is at work in private, in public, and everywhere. And that the one we call Savior and Lord is the Son of God, the prophetic Scriptures prove outright. So the Lord of everyone, of Greeks and of those who are not Greeks, persuades those who are willing. He does not force the man who is able to receive salvation from him — able because he chooses, and carries out, what belongs to laying hold of the hope.

It was he, too, who gave philosophy to the Greeks by means of the lesser angels; for by an ancient and divine arrangement the angels are distributed among the nations. But the glory of those who believe is “the Lord’s portion.” Consider the alternatives. Either the Lord does not care for all people — and that is either because he cannot, which is not to be thought, since it would be proof of weakness, or because he will not, which does not belong to a good being; and a being who took on flesh capable of suffering for our sake is a long way from luxurious idleness. Or else he does care for all, as befits the one who has become Lord of all. For he is Savior — not the Savior of some and not of others. In proportion to what each is fit for, he has dealt out his generosity to Greeks and to those who are not Greeks, even to those of them who were marked out beforehand and called in due time, the faithful and the chosen.

Nor can he who called all alike, and assigned special honors to those who believed in a specially excellent way, ever begrudge anyone anything. Nor can he who is Lord of all, and who serves above all else the will of the good and almighty Father, ever be hindered by another. Envy does not touch the Lord, who was without beginning and whom nothing could make suffer; and human affairs are not the sort of thing the Lord would envy. It is someone else, a being whom passion has touched, who envies.

And it cannot be said that the Lord is unwilling to save humanity out of ignorance, on the ground that he does not know how each person is to be cared for. Ignorance does not apply to the God who, before the foundation of the world, was the Father’s counselor. For he was the Wisdom “in which” the sovereign God “delighted.” The Son is the power of God, being the Father’s Word, the most ancient thing there is, before anything was produced; and he is the Father’s Wisdom. So he is properly called the Teacher of the beings he formed. And he never abandons his care for people by being drawn aside toward pleasure — he who took on flesh that by its nature can suffer, and trained it into a condition where suffering could not move it.

And how is he Savior and Lord if he is not the Savior and Lord of all? He is the Savior of those who have believed, because they wanted to know; and he is the Lord of those who have not believed, until they are able to confess him and so obtain the particular and fitting gift that comes through him. Now the Lord’s working refers back to the Almighty, and the Son is, so to speak, a working of the Father. So the Savior can never be a hater of humanity. Out of his surpassing love for human flesh he did not despise its liability to suffering, but clothed himself in it and came for the salvation all people share; for the faith of those who have chosen it is a thing held in common. What is more, he will never neglect his own work, since of all living creatures the human being alone was made with a conception of God in him. And there can be no better or more suitable government for people than the one God appoints.

It is always right, then, for the one who is superior by nature to be set over the inferior, and for the one who is able to manage a thing well to be given the management of it. Now what truly rules and presides is the divine Word and his providence, which inspects everything and thinks nothing that belongs to it beneath its care. Those, then, who choose to belong to him are the ones brought to completion through faith. He, the Son, is by the will of the almighty Father the cause of every good thing, the first cause that sets motion going — a power the senses cannot lay hold of. What he was, was not seen by people who through the weakness of the flesh could not take it in. But once he had taken on flesh the senses could reach, he came to show a human being what obedience to the commandments makes possible. Being the Father’s power, then, he easily prevails in what he wants, leaving not even the smallest point of his administration unattended to; otherwise the whole would not have been well carried out by him.

But as I see it, what marks out the highest power is the exact scrutiny of all the parts, reaching down even to the smallest, and ending in the first Administrator of the universe, who by the Father’s will directs the salvation of all — some overseeing who are set under others, and those others set over them, until you come to the great High Priest. For on one original first Principle, which acts according to the Father’s will, the first and the second and the third depend. Then at the topmost edge of the visible world stands the blessed company of angels; and down as far as ourselves, rank under rank, are ranged those who both are saved and save, from One and through One.

As the tiniest fragment of iron is moved by the power that streams from the Heraclean stone when that power is spread out along many iron rings, so too the virtuous, drawn by the Holy Spirit, are attached by kinship to the first dwelling, and the others after them in succession down to the last. But those who are bad out of weakness — who have fallen from a greed for vice that can never be filled into a corrupt state, neither controlling anything nor controlled — go whirling round and round, spun about by the passions, and fall to the ground.

For this was the law from the beginning: that virtue should be a matter of free choice. That is why the commandments, both under the Law and before the Law — not given to the upright, since “the law is not laid down for a righteous man” — laid it down that the man who chose them should receive eternal life and the blessed prize. And on the other hand they allowed the man who had taken his pleasure in vice to keep company with the things he chose; and they laid it down that the soul which keeps improving, gaining more virtue and growing in righteousness, should obtain a better place in the universe, since at every step forward it tends toward the settled state in which the passions no longer move it, until “it arrives at a full-grown man,” at excellence in knowledge and in inheritance at once. These healthful turns, following the order of change, are marked off by times, by places, by honors, by kinds of knowledge, by inheritances and by ministries, each according to the particular order of its own change, on up to the surpassing and unbroken contemplation of the Lord in eternity.

Now what is lovable draws to the sight of itself everyone who, out of love of knowledge, gives himself wholly to contemplation. That is why the Lord, drawing both sets of commandments — the first he gave and the second — from one spring, neither let those who lived before the Law be without law, nor left those who did not know the principles of the non-Greek philosophy without restraint. Having furnished the one group with commandments and the other with philosophy, he shut unbelief up until his coming. Which is why everyone who does not believe is without excuse. For by two different routes of advance, for Greek and for non-Greek alike, he leads people to the completion that comes by faith.

And if some Greek skips the preliminary training of Greek philosophy and goes straight to the true teaching, he outstrips the others, unlettered though he is, by choosing the short road: salvation by faith, all the way to completion. So everything that did not get in the way of a man’s choice being free, God made and turned into a help toward virtue, so that somehow or other, even to people who can see only dimly, the one and only almighty and good God might be shown — saving by his Son, from everlasting to everlasting.

And on the other hand he is in no respect whatever the cause of evil. For everything is arranged by the Lord of the universe with a view to the salvation of the universe, both in general and in particular. It is the work of the righteousness that belongs to salvation to improve everything as far as it can be improved. Even lesser matters are arranged with a view to saving what is better, and to a dwelling that suits each person’s character. Everything virtuous changes for the better, and the proper cause of that change is the free choice of knowledge, which the soul has in its own power. But the corrections that have to be made — through the goodness of the great overseeing Judge, by the attendant angels, by various acts of judgment given in advance, and by the perfect judgment — compel outrageous sinners to repent.