Miscellanies 2.4.12–2.7.35

But we, who have received from the Lord through the Scriptures that choice and avoidance have been given to human beings with sovereign freedom, rest on faith as an unshakable criterion, having shown a willing spirit, because we have chosen life and have believed God through his voice. And the one who has believed the Word knows the matter to be true; for the Word is truth. But the one who disbelieved the speaker disbelieved God. “By faith we understand that the ages were framed by the word of God, so that what is seen came into being from what does not appear,” says the apostle. “By faith Abel offered a greater sacrifice than Cain, through which he was attested to be righteous, God bearing witness to his gifts; and through it, though he died, he still speaks,” and so on, down to “than to have the passing enjoyment of sin.” These, then, faith justified even before the law and made heirs of the divine promise.

Why, then, should I go on collecting and setting out the testimonies to faith from our history? For “time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David and Samuel and the prophets,” and what follows. There being four things in which truth lies, sense, mind, knowledge, and opinion, mind is first by nature, but sense is first for us and in relation to us; from sense and mind the essence of knowledge is composed; and what is evident is common to mind and sense. But sense is the stepping stone to knowledge; and faith, having traveled through sensible things, leaves opinion behind, hastens to what is free from falsehood, and remains in the truth. If someone says that knowledge is demonstrative with reason, let him hear that first principles are indemonstrable; for they are known neither by art nor by prudence; for prudence concerns what can be otherwise, and art is only productive, not also contemplative.

So only by faith is it possible to reach the first principle of the universe. For all knowledge can be taught, and what can be taught comes from what is already known. But the first principle of the universe was not known beforehand to the Greeks; not to Thales, who thought water the first cause, nor to the other natural philosophers after him. For even if Anaxagoras was the first to set mind over things, even he did not keep to the efficient cause, painting some senseless vortexes, together with the inactivity and folly of mind. That is why the Word says, “Call no one on earth your teacher.” For knowledge is a demonstrative state, but faith is a grace that raises from indemonstrable things to the universal, the simple, which is neither with matter, nor matter, nor subject to matter.

But the unbelievers, it seems, drag everything from heaven and the invisible to earth, literally grasping rocks and oaks with their hands, according to Plato; for, laying hold of all such things, they insist that only that exists which offers resistance and touch, defining body and essence as the same. And those who dispute with them defend themselves very cautiously from above, from somewhere invisible, compelling that certain intelligible and bodiless forms are the true essence. “Behold, I make new things,” says the Word, “which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man”: with a new eye, a new hearing, a new heart, whatever can be seen, heard, and grasped through faith and understanding, when the Lord's disciples speak, hear, and act spiritually. For there is genuine coin and another counterfeit, which deceives the unskilled no less, but not the money-changers, who have learned to separate and distinguish the counterfeit from the genuine. So the money-changer tells the unskilled only that the coin is counterfeit; but how, only the banker's apprentice, trained for this, learns. Aristotle says that the judgment following knowledge, that this particular thing is true, is faith. Faith, then, is more authoritative than knowledge and is its criterion.

Conjecture, being a weak opinion, counterfeits faith, as the flatterer counterfeits the friend and the wolf the dog. And since we see that the carpenter becomes a craftsman by learning something, and the pilot, having been taught the art, will be able to steer, reckoning that merely wishing to become noble and good is not enough, one must learn by obeying; and to obey the Word, whom we have proclaimed Teacher, is to believe him, opposing him in nothing. For how is it possible to stand against God? Knowledge, then, is worthy of faith, and faith worthy of knowledge, by a certain divine sequence and reciprocity. Indeed Epicurus too, who most of all preferred pleasure to truth, supposes faith to be a preconception of the mind; and he defines preconception as an application to something evident and to the evident notion of the thing; and says that no one can inquire, or doubt, or even hold an opinion, or even refute, without preconception.

How could anyone who has no preconception of what he seeks learn about what he inquires into? The one who has learned has already turned the preconception into apprehension. And if the learner does not learn without a preconception that receives what is said, he has ears to hear the truth; and “blessed is he who speaks into the ears of those who hear,” as indeed the one who obeys is blessed too. To hear attentively is to understand. If, then, faith is nothing but a preconception of the mind about what is said, and this is called obedience, understanding, and persuasion, no one will learn without faith, since not without preconception either. So what was said by the prophet is shown to be true above all: “If you do not believe, neither will you understand.” Heraclitus of Ephesus too, paraphrasing this oracle, said: “If one does not hope for the unhoped-for, one will not find it, since it is unsearchable and trackless.”

And Plato the philosopher too says in the Laws that the one who is to become blessed and happy must share in the truth right from the beginning, so as to live as long a time as possible being true; for he is trustworthy. But the untrustworthy is he to whom voluntary falsehood is dear, and the one to whom it is involuntary is senseless; neither of these is to be envied; for everyone untrustworthy and ignorant is friendless. And perhaps he speaks of this as the kingly wisdom in a veiled way in the Euthydemus. At any rate in the Statesman he says word for word: “So the knowledge of the true king is kingly, and the one who possesses it, whether he happens to be a ruler or a private person, will rightly be called kingly according to the art itself.” Thus those who have believed in Christ are and are called good (chrēstoi), as those cared for by the king are truly kingly. For as the wise are wise by wisdom and the lawful lawful by law, so those who belong to Christ the King are kingly, the Christians. Then, further on, he adds clearly: “What is right would be lawful, and law, being by nature right reason, and not in writings or other things.” And the Eleatic Stranger declares the kingly and political man to be a living law.

Such is the one who fulfills the law and does the will of the Father, inscribed plainly on a high wood, set out as an example of divine virtue to those able to see. The Greeks know the scytales of the ephors in Sparta, inscribed with the law on wooden staffs; but my law, as has been said, is kingly and living and right reason: “Law, king of all, mortals and immortals,” as Pindar the Boeotian sings. Speusippus, in the first book of his work against Cleophon, seems to write things like Plato in this: “For if kingship is good, and the wise man alone is king and ruler, the law, being right reason, is good”; which is so. Consistently with these, the Stoic philosophers teach, attributing kingship, priesthood, prophecy, legislation, wealth, true beauty, nobility, and freedom only to the wise man; who is admitted even by them to be very hard to find.

All the doctrines mentioned above appear, then, to have been handed down from the great Moses to the Greeks. He teaches that all things belong to the wise man by these words: “And because God has had mercy on me, I have all things.” And he shows him to be dear to God, saying: “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” For the one is found expressly called a friend, the other is shown to have been renamed “the one who sees God”; and Isaac, allegorized as a consecrated sacrifice, he chose for himself to be a type for us of the plan of salvation. And among the Greeks Minos is sung as a king “who at nine years old conversed with Zeus,” since they had heard how God once talked with Moses, “as one would speak to his own friend.”

Moses, then, was wise, king, and lawgiver; but our Savior surpasses all human nature. He is beautiful, so as alone to be loved by us who long for the true beauty, for he was the true light; he is shown to be king, proclaimed both by children still innocent and by unbelieving and ignorant Jews, and heralded by the prophets themselves; so rich that he despised all the gold above and below the earth, together with all the glory offered him by the adversary. What need is there to say that he alone is the high priest, alone knowing the worship of God, Melchizedek, king of peace, the most fit of all to lead the human race? He is the lawgiver, giving the law in the mouth of the prophets, commanding and teaching most clearly what must and must not be done.

Who could be of nobler birth than he, whose only Father is God? Come, let us present Plato too as approaching the same doctrines. He called the wise man rich in the Phaedrus, saying: “O dear Pan and all you other gods of this place, grant me to become beautiful within; and that whatever I have outside may be friendly to what is within. And may I consider the wise man rich.” And the Athenian Stranger, blaming those who think that those who possess much money are rich, says this: “It is impossible for people to be very rich and good, at least those whom the many count rich; and they mean those who possess, among a few people, possessions worth the most money, which even a bad man may possess.” “The whole world of wealth belongs to the believer,” says Solomon, “but to the unbeliever not even an obol.” Much more, then, must we believe Scripture, which says that a camel will pass through the eye of a needle sooner than a rich man will philosophize. On the other hand it blesses the poor, as Plato understood when he said: “Poverty must be thought to be not diminishing one's property but increasing one's greed.” For it is never lack of money but insatiability, from which the good man is free, that makes poverty; and he would be rich. And in the Alcibiades he calls vice slavish and virtue fit for a free man. “Take off from yourselves the heavy yoke and take the gentle one,” Scripture says, as the poets too speak of a “yoke of slavery.” And “you were sold by your sins” agrees with what has been said. “Everyone who commits sin is a slave. And the slave does not remain in the house forever. But if the Son sets you free, you will be free, and the truth will set you free.” And the Athenian Stranger says that the wise man is beautiful, in this way: “As if someone should insist that the just, even if they happen to be ugly in body, are altogether beautiful in respect of their most just character, hardly anyone would seem to speak amiss in saying so.” And “his form was lacking beyond all the sons of men,” the prophecy foretold. And Plato called the wise man king in the Statesman, and the passage has been quoted.

Having shown these things, let us run back again to the discussion of faith. Plato, then, with every demonstration, presents somewhat thus that faith is needed everywhere, praising peace at the same time: “For no one would be faithful and sound in civil strife without the whole of virtue; but there are very many mercenaries who are warlike and willing to die in war, most of whom become bold and unjust, insolent and senseless, except a very few. If this is rightly said, every lawgiver who is of the least use will make his laws looking above all to the greatest virtue. And this is faithfulness, which we need at every time, in peace, in every war, and in all the rest of life; for it seems to contain the others by embracing them. The best is neither war nor civil strife, for it is to be prayed against that there should be need of these; but peace with one another together with friendliness is the best.” From these it appears that according to Plato the greatest prayer is to have peace, and the greatest mother of the virtues is faith.

Fittingly, then, it is said in Solomon, “Wisdom is in the mouth of the faithful,” since Xenocrates too, in his work On Prudence, says that wisdom is the knowledge of first causes and of intelligible substance, considering prudence twofold, the practical and the contemplative, which is human wisdom. So wisdom is prudence, but not all prudence is wisdom. It has been shown that the knowledge of the first principle of the universe is faith, not demonstration. For it is absurd that the followers of Pythagoras of Samos, renouncing demonstrations of what is inquired into, should consider “He himself said it” as faith, and be satisfied with this voice alone for the confirmation of what they had heard, while those who love to behold the truth, attempting to disbelieve the trustworthy Teacher, the only Savior God, should demand from him proofs of what is said. But he says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” And who is this? Let Epicharmus say: “Mind sees and mind hears; all else is deaf and blind.” Heraclitus, rebuking some as unbelievers, says, “knowing neither how to hear nor how to speak,” benefiting no doubt from Solomon: “If you love to hear, you will receive; and if you incline your ear, you will be wise.”

“Lord, who has believed our report?” says Isaiah. “For faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of God,” says the apostle. “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how will they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? And how will they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: How beautiful are the feet of those who preach good news.” You see how he leads faith up through hearing and the preaching of the apostles to the word of the Lord and the Son of God? Do we not yet understand that the word of the Lord is a demonstration? As playing ball depends not only on the one who throws the ball skillfully, but also requires the one who catches it well, so that the game may be carried out by the rules of ball-playing; so teaching too is trustworthy when the faith of the hearers, being, so to speak, a natural art, helps toward learning.

So too fertile soil works together for the sowing of seeds. For there is no benefit from the best teaching without the learner's reception, nor from prophecy, if the hearers' ready obedience is not present. For dry twigs, being ready to receive the power of fire, are kindled more easily; and the famous stone attracts iron through kinship, as the amber tear draws twigs and amber stirs chaff; and the things drawn obey them, drawn by an unspeakable spirit, not as causes but as joint causes. Since, then, the form of vice is twofold, one with deceit and escaping notice, the other leading and carrying off by force, the divine Word has cried out, calling all together, knowing well especially those who will not obey; but nevertheless, since obeying or not rests with us, so that none may plead ignorance, he has made the calling just, and demands from each according to his ability. For some have both willing and power together, having increased this by practice and been purified; others, even if they are not yet able, already have the will. Willing is a work of the soul, but doing is not without the body. Nor are actions measured by the result alone; they are also judged by each one's choice: whether he chose easily, whether he repented of his sins, whether he gained understanding of his failures and changed his mind, that is, came to know afterward. For repentance is slow knowledge, but the first knowledge is sinlessness.

Repentance too, then, is an achievement of faith. For if someone does not believe that what he was held by is a sin, he will not change; and if he does not believe that punishment hangs over the offender and salvation over the one who lives by the commandments, not even so will he change. Hope too is constituted from faith. The followers of Basilides define faith as the assent of the soul to something that does not stir the senses because it is not present. Hope is the expectation of possessing a good; and the expectation must be faithful. The faithful man is one who keeps unswervingly what has been entrusted to him; and what is entrusted to us are the words about God and the divine words, the commandments, together with the carrying out of the precepts. This is “the faithful servant” praised by the Lord. And when it says “God is faithful,” it shows that he is worthy to be believed when he declares something; and his Word declares, and God himself would be faithful. How, then, if believing is supposing, do the philosophers think their own teachings firm? For voluntary assent before demonstration is not supposition, but assent to something strong.

And who could be stronger than God? Unbelief is a weak negative supposition of the opposite, as incredulity is a state that hardly admits faith. Faith is a voluntary supposition and a well-disposed preconception before apprehension; expectation is an opinion about the future, while the expectation of others is an opinion about what is uncertain; confidence is a firm judgment about something. That is why we believe in whom we have confidence, for divine glory and salvation. And we have confidence in God alone, whom we know will not transgress what he has nobly promised us, and what he has created and given us for these ends out of goodwill. Goodwill is wishing good things to another for his own sake. For he needs nothing; but the benefaction and the kindness from the Lord end in us, being divine goodwill and goodwill directed to doing good. And if “Abraham believed and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and we are the seed of Abraham through hearing, we too must believe. For we are Israelites, obedient not through signs but through hearing. That is why it says: “Rejoice, barren one who does not bear; break forth and shout, you who are not in labor; for the children of the desolate are more than those of her who has a husband.” “You have lived in the enclosure of the people; your children were blessed in the tents of the fathers.” And if the same dwellings are proclaimed by the prophecy to us and to the patriarchs, the one God of both covenants is shown.

At any rate he adds more clearly: “You have inherited the covenant of Israel,” speaking to the calling from the Gentiles, once barren of this husband, who is the Word, formerly deserted by the Bridegroom. “And the righteous will live by faith,” the faith according to the covenant and the commandments, since these, two in name and time, given by the divine plan according to age and progress, but one in power, the one old, the other new, are supplied through the Son by one God. As the apostle too says in the letter to the Romans: “For the righteousness of God is revealed in it from faith to faith,” teaching the one salvation, perfected from prophecy to gospel through one and the same Lord. “This charge I commit to you,” he said, “my child Timothy, according to the prophecies that went before about you, that by them you may wage the good warfare, having faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and made shipwreck of the faith,” because they defiled with unbelief the conscience that came from God.

So we must not … fittingly slander faith as something ready to hand, easy, and common, belonging to ordinary people. For if the pursuit were human, as the Greeks supposed, it would have been extinguished; but it grows, and there is no place where it is not. I say, then, that faith, whether founded by love or by fear, as its accusers say, is something divine, neither torn away by other worldly friendship nor dissolved by present fear. For love makes believers by friendship toward faith, and faith, the foundation of love, brings in turn good deeds; when fear too, the law's schoolmaster, is believed from its effects. Fear too is believed to exist. For if existence is shown in acting, then fear, which is about to act and threatens, not acting and present, is believed; and, believed to exist, it is not itself the begetter of faith, since it is by faith that it is proved trustworthy.

Divine, then, is so great a change, that someone from unbelief should become a believer and believe both in hope and in fear. Faith appears to us as the first inclination toward salvation, after which fear, hope, and repentance, advancing together with self-control and endurance, lead us to love and to knowledge. Fittingly, then, the apostle Barnabas says: “From what I have received, I have been eager to send you a little at a time, so that with your faith you may also have perfect knowledge. The helpers of our faith, then, are fear and endurance, and our allies long-suffering and self-control. While these remain pure,” he says, “in what concerns the Lord, wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and insight rejoice with them.” Since the virtues just mentioned are the elements of knowledge, faith turns out to be more elementary still, as necessary to the one who knows as breathing is to life for one living in this world; and as without the four elements it is not possible to live, so without faith knowledge cannot follow. This, then, is the foundation of truth.

Those who accuse fear attack the law; and if the law, then clearly also God who gave the law. For these three things necessarily exist in relation to the subject: the one who governs, the governing, and the governed. If, then, by hypothesis they should take away the law, it would necessarily follow that each one who is led by desire, gratifying pleasure, would neglect what is right, despise the divine, and at the same time act impiously and unjustly without fear, having leapt away from the truth. “Yes,” they say, “fear is an irrational avoidance and a passion.” What are you saying? And how will this definition still hold for you, when the commandment has been given me through the Word? The commandment forbids, hanging fear over us for the training of those who thus accept being admonished. Fear, then, is not irrational; it is rational. For how could it not be, when it exhorts, “You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness”? But if they quibble about names, let the philosophers call the fear of the law “caution,”

since it is a reasonable avoidance. Critolaus of Phaselis not inappropriately called such people “fighters about names.” So the commandment has now appeared elegant and most beautiful even to those who accuse us, once understood by a change of name. Caution, then, is shown to be rational, being an avoidance of what harms; and from it springs repentance for sins previously committed. For “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and good understanding belongs to all who practice it.” He speaks of the practice of wisdom, which is the fear of God making a road to wisdom. And if the law produces fear, the knowledge of the law is the beginning of wisdom, and there is no one wise without law. Those who reject the law, then, are without wisdom, and it follows that they are to be counted godless. And “instruction is the beginning of wisdom.” “But the ungodly will despise wisdom and instruction,” says Scripture.

Let us see what fearful things the law announces. If they are the things between virtue and vice, such as poverty, disease, lack of reputation, low birth, and the like, the laws of cities are praised for holding these out, and this view is in harmony with the Peripatetics, who introduce three kinds of goods and reckon their opposites to be evils. But the law given to us commands us to flee what are truly evils: adultery, licentiousness, the corruption of boys, ignorance, injustice, disease of the soul, death, not the death that separates the soul from the body, but the one that separates the soul from the truth. For these vices are truly terrible and fearful, and the actions that come from them. “Not unjustly are nets spread for birds,” say the divine oracles; “for they themselves, sharing in blood, treasure up evils for themselves.” How, then, is the law still said by certain heresies not to be good, when they cry out the apostle's words, “For through the law comes the knowledge of sin”? To them we say: the law did not make sin, but showed it. For by commanding what must be done it exposed what must not be done. And it is the mark of a good thing to teach what saves and to point out what harms, to counsel the use of the one and to command flight from the other.

Indeed the apostle, whom they do not understand, said that the knowledge of sin was made manifest through the law, not that sin received its existence from it. And how is the law not good, which trains, which was given as a “schoolmaster to Christ,” so that, being set straight through fear in the way of training, we might turn to the perfection that comes through Christ? “I do not wish,” he says, “the death of the sinner so much as his repentance.” And the commandment produces repentance, forbidding what must not be done and promising benefits. By death, I think, he means ignorance. And “the one who is near the Lord is full of stripes”: clearly the one who draws near to knowledge enjoys dangers, fears, troubles, and afflictions because of his longing for the truth. For “an instructed son turned out wise,” and “an understanding son was saved from the burning heat,” and “an understanding son will receive commandments.” And Barnabas the apostle, after first saying, “Woe to those who are wise in their own sight and understanding before themselves,” added: “Let us become spiritual, a perfect temple to God. As far as it lies with us, let us practice the fear of God and strive to keep his commandments, so that we may rejoice in his ordinances.” Hence “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” has been divinely said.