Miscellanies 4.3.9

For this reason, it seems to me, Pythagoras too said that God alone is wise (since the apostle too writes in the letter to the Romans: “made known to all the nations for the obedience of faith, to the only wise God through Jesus Christ”), and called himself a philosopher because of his friendship with God. God spoke with Moses, at any rate, it says, “as a friend with a friend.” The truth, then, is plain to God; for he begets the truth, while the one who knows loves the truth. “Go to the ant, you sluggard, and become the bee's disciple,” says Solomon. For if each thing has one work proper to its nature, of the ox likewise, the horse, and the dog, what would we say is the proper work of man? He is like, I think, a centaur, a Thessalian fiction, composed of rational and irrational, of soul and body. But the body works the earth and hastens to the earth, while the soul is stretched toward God; the soul, at any rate, trained by true philosophy, hastens to its kindred above, turning away from the desires of the body, and besides these from toil and fear; yet we have shown that both endurance and fear are on the side of the good. For if “through the law comes knowledge of sin,” as those who run down the law say, and “until the law sin was in the world,” we answer them in turn, “but apart from the law sin is dead.” For when you take away the cause of fear, sin, you take away fear, and much more still punishment, when what by nature desires is absent; for “the law is not laid down for the righteous,” Scripture says.