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+{
+    "title": "On the Confusion of Tongues",
+    "language": "en",
+    "versionTitle": "merged",
+    "versionSource": "https://www.sefaria.org/On_the_Confusion_of_Tongues",
+    "text": {
+        "Introduction": [
+            "ON THE CONFUSION OF TONGUES (DE CONFUSIONE LINGUARUM) <br>ANALYTICAL INTRODUCTION",
+            "The text of this treatise is Gen. 11:1–9, which is given in full in the first section.",
+            "Philo begins by stating the objections which the sceptical critics had brought against the story. They had said that the project of building a tower to reach heaven was really the same as the Homeric myth of the Aloeidae (2–4), and had pointed out the absurdity of the idea (5). Secondly they had said that the story of the confusion of tongues was much the same as the fable that all animals originally understood each other’s language and lost the privilege by presumption (6–8), and though the story in Genesis was a little more rational, still the idea that the multiplication of languages would serve to prevent co-operation in sin was absurd (9–13). Philo will leave the literalists to answer these criticisms as they can. His own answer is to give an allegorical interpretation of the whole story (14–15).",
+            "By “one lip and one voice” Moses is indicating a “symphony” of evils, which is seen not only in the multitude, but in the individual (16), where it sometimes takes the form of the external calamities of fortune (16–20), but still more in the passions which beset the soul (21–22), of which the deluge story is an allegory (23–25), as also the alliance against Abraham (26), and the attack of the whole people of Sodom upon the angel visitors (27–28). The illustration which follows leads to a meditation on the word “lip” (χεῖλος) which also means “edge.” Moses met Pharoah on the “lip” of the river. The Egyptians lay dead on the “lip” of the sea (29–36), and since “lip” means speech, we may see in this death the silencing of convicted falsehood (37–38), though here a caution is needed. There are many unskilled in refuting falsehood and they can only do so with God’s help (39).",
+            "The “symphony” of evil suggests the “symphony” of good, and this appears in the words of the patriarchs “we are men of peace, sons of one man.” The one man is the Divine Logos, and only those who acknowledge him are men of peace, while the opposite creed of polytheism breeds discord (40–43). Yet this peace is also a war against the symphony of evil. This thought leads to an exposition of Jeremiah 15:10, particularly of the description by the prophet of himself as a “man of war” (43–51), and hence to the “symphony” gained by the Captains who fought against Midian (52–57), and the highest of all symphonies, when Israel would “do and hear,” that is would do God’s will even before they heard the commandment (58–59).",
+            "The next verse of the text is “as they march from the east (or “rising”) they <i>found</i> a plain in the land of Shinar (interpreted as shaking off) and <i>dwelt</i> there.” “Rising” and “shaking off” being applicable to good and ill lead to illustrations from other texts where these words occur (60–74). “Finding” suggests that the wicked actually seek evil (75), and “dwelling there” suggests the contrast (illustrated from sayings of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses) of the good man regarding himself as only a sojourner in the body (76–82).",
+            "We now come to the building of the city and tower. The third verse is “come let us make bricks and bake them with fire.” By “brick-making” is meant the analysing and shaping of evil-minded thoughts (83–90), and we are reminded that such brick-making is also imposed upon the Israel-soul, when once it is in bondage to Egypt (91–93). This last thought gives rise to a very loosely connected meditation on the vision of the Divine granted to the liberated Israel in Ex. 24. and the interpretation of its details (94–100). The “baking with fire” signifies the solidarity which sophistical argument gives to their vices, and so too we have “their brick became a stone” (101–102). But on the other hand the “asphalt became clay,” that is, God subverts their evil designs, before they attain the safety (ἀσφάλεια) of “asphalt” (103–104). Two thoughts on “asphalt” follow suggesting that its “safety” is rather the safety of bodily than of spiritual things (105–106).",
+            "“Let us build ourselves a city and tower whose head shall reach to heaven.” Our souls are cities and the fool summons all his senses and passions to help him build his city with its tower or acropolis to his taste (107–112). When the tower seeks to rise to heaven, it signifies the impious attempt of theological falsities (especially the denial of providence) to attack celestial truths (113–115). On the next words “let us make our name” Philo bursts into invective against the madness of the wicked in actually flaunting their wickedness (116–118). It is true indeed that they have an inkling that there is a divine judgement awaiting them as they shew by the next words “before we are scattered abroad” (119–121). But this is only in the background of their thoughts. In general they are of Cain’s lineage and believe in the self-sufficiency of man, the folly of which Philo denounces in his usual way, and this self-sufficiency gives a second meaning to the words “its head shall reach to heaven” (122–128). But this tower will be overthrown even as Gideon overthrew the tower of Penuel (turning away from God), not in war but when he returned in peace—the true peace (129–132). By a third interpretation “heaven” may mean “mind,” and the attempt to reach it be the attempt to exalt sense above mind (133).",
+            "The words “the Lord came down to see the city and the tower” call for the usual protest against anthropomorphism, and Philo again emphasizes the truth that God’s Potencies are everywhere, while His essential nature is not in space at all (134–139). The intention of Moses in using the phrase is to shew us by God’s example the need of close examination before we dogmatize, and the superiority of sight to hearsay (140–141). As for the phrase the “sons of men,” some may scoff at it as a pleonasm, but the true meaning is that these builders are not, like the pious, “sons of God” (141–145), nor yet sons of “one man,” that is the Logos (146–147). Son-ship in fact is often in the scriptures used in this spiritual sense (148–149). The next words, “behold they are all one race and one lip,” give rise to the thought that there may easily be unison in the worst disharmony (150–151), while in “they have begun to do this” “this” is the impiety against heaven which crowns their misdeeds to men. They only “began,” for heaven is inviolable and blasphemies recoil upon the blasphemer (152–154), yet they are treated as though they succeeded, which is indicated by the words “the tower which they built” (155). (At this point Philo interpolates a curious piece of literalism; not only is it a physical impossibility to build such a tower, but anyone who attempted it would be blasted by the heat of the sun) (156–157). That the punishment entailed by the accomplished sin falls upon the undertaken sin is shewn in Balaam’s fate (158–159), and the law which refuses sanctuary to him who has attempted murder (160). (Incidentally this law is given the spiritual meaning that the mind which believes God to be the author of evil as well as good and thus throws the responsibility for its own sins upon Him, is essentially unholy) (161). The next words, “nothing shall fail them of all they attempt,” teach us that the greatest punishment God can give is to give the sinner opportunity without restraint, and this is illustrated (as in <i>Quod Det.</i> 141 ff.) by Cain’s word “that I should be let free is the greater indictment (or punishment)” (162–167).",
+            "When we come to the words “let us go down and confound their tongues” we have first to explain the plural in God’s mouth, of which he gives other examples (168–169). He then puts forward, as in <i>De Op.</i> 75, the theory (based on the <i>Timaeus</i>) that God committed certain tasks to his lieutenants, the Potencies and the spiritual beings called “Angels” (170–175). As man also has free will and is therefore capable of sin God shared the work of man’s creation with His ministers, that He Himself should not be the cause of evil (176–179). So too He calls upon His subordinates (here definitely called Angels) to bring the punishment of “confusion” upon the impious (180–182). As for the word “confusion” (σύγχυσις) we may accept the philosophic usage in which it stands for a mixing so complete that the original properties of the ingredients are destroyed, in contrast to μίξις where the ingredients are merely juxtaposed, and κρᾶσις where though chemically combined they can still be analysed (183–188). Thus σύγχυσις of the impious means that their powers are so annihilated that neither separately nor in combination they can work mischief (189). The literalist interpretation that the story merely describes the differentiation of languages may not be untrue, but it is inadequate. Had such differentiation been intended we should have expected some such term as separation or distribution rather than confusion, and moreover differentiation of function, as we see in the human organism, is beneficial rather than the reverse (190–195). That σύγχυσις implies destruction in this passage is confirmed by the words which follow, “the Lord dispersed them thence,” for dispersion conveys a similar idea (196). The dispersion of the wicked will imply the reassembling of the good whom they had dispersed, in fact establish the “symphony” of virtues in the place of the “symphony” of evil. Viewed in this double light of “destruction” and “dispersion” the name σύγχυσις well describes the fool whose life is as worthless as it is unstable (197-end)."
+        ],
+        "": [
+            [
+                "[1] Enough has been said on these matters. The next question which demands our careful consideration is the confusion of tongues and the lessons of wisdom taught by Moses thereon. For he says as follows.",
+                "“And all the earth was one lip and there was one voice to all. And it came to pass as they moved from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and dwelt there. And a man said to his neighbour, Come, let us make bricks and bake them with fire. And the brick became as stone to them and the clay was asphalt to them. And they said, ‘Come, let us build for ourselves a city and a tower, whose head shall be unto heaven, and let us make our name before we are scattered abroad, on the face of all the earth.’ And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men built. And the Lord said, ‘Behold, they have all one race and one lip, and they have begun to do this, and now nothing shall fail from them of all that they attempt to do. Come and let us go down and confuse their tongue there, that they may not understand each the voice of his neighbour.’ And the Lord scattered them abroad thence on the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city and the tower. Therefore the name of the city was called ‘Confusion,’ because the Lord confounded there the lips of the whole earth, and the Lord scattered them thence over the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 11:1–9)."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[2] Persons who cherish a dislike of the institutions of our fathers and make it their constant study to denounce and decry the Laws find in these and similar passages openings as it were for their godlessness. “Can you still,” say these impious scoffers, “speak gravely of the ordinances as containing the canons of absolute truth? For see your so-called holy books contain also myths, which you regularly deride when you hear them related by others.",
+                "[3] And indeed,” they continue, “it is needless to collect the numerous examples scattered about the Law-book, as we might had we leisure to spend in exposing its failings. We have but to remind you of the instances which lie at our very feet and ready to our hand.”",
+                "[4] One of these we have here, which resembles the fable told of the Aloeidae, who according to Homer the greatest and most reputed of poets planned to pile the three loftiest mountains on each other in one heap, hoping that when these were raised to the height of the upper sky they would furnish an easy road to heaven for those who wished to ascend thither. Homer’s lines on this subject run thus:",
+                "<small>They on Olympus Ossa fain would pile, <br>On Ossa Pelion with its quivering leaves, <br>In hope thereby to climb the heights of heaven.</small>",
+                "Olympus, Ossa and Pelion are names of mountains.",
+                "[5] For these the lawgiver substitutes a tower which he represents as being built by the men of that day who wished in their folly and insolent pride to touch the heaven. Folly indeed; surely dreadful madness! For if one should lay a small foundation and build up upon it the different parts of the whole earth, rising in the form of a single pillar, it would still be divided by vast distances from the sphere of ether, particularly if we accept the view of the philosophers who inquire into such problems, all of whom are agreed that the earth is the centre of the universe."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[6] Another similar story is to be found in the writings of the mythologists, telling of the days when all animals had a common language. The tale is that in old days all animals, whether on land or in water or winged, had the same language, and just as among men to-day Greeks talk with Greeks and barbarians with barbarians if they have the same tongue, so too every creature conversed with every other, about all that happened to be done to them or by them, and in this way they mourned together at misfortunes, and rejoiced together when anything of advantage came their way.",
+                "[7] For since community of language led them to impart to each other their pleasures and discomforts, both emotions were shared by them in common. As a result they gained a similarity of temperament and feeling until surfeited with the abundance of their present blessings they desired the unattainable, as so often happens, and wrecked their happiness thereon. They sent an embassy to demand immortality, asking that they might be exempted from old age and allowed to enjoy the vigour of youth for ever. They pleaded that one of their fellow-creatures, that mere reptile the serpent, had already obtained this boon, since he shed his old age and renewed his youth afresh, and it was absurd that the superior beings should fare worse than the inferior, or all than the one.",
+                "[8] However, for this audacity they were punished as they deserved. For their speech at once became different, so that from that day forward they could no longer understand each other, because of the difference of the languages into which the single language which they all shared had been divided."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[9] Now Moses, say the objectors, brings his story nearer to reality and makes a distinction between reasoning and unreasoning creatures, so that the unity of language for which he vouches applies to men only. Still even this, they say, is mythical. They point out that the division of speech into a multitude of different kinds of language, which Moses calls “Confusion of tongues,” is in the story brought about as a remedy for sin, to the end that men should no longer through mutual understanding be partners in iniquity, but be deaf in a sense to each other and thus cease to act together to effect the same purposes.",
+                "[10] But no good result appears to have been attained by it. For all the same after they had been separated into different nations and no longer spoke the same tongue, land and sea were constantly full of innumerable evil deeds. For it is not the utterances of men but the presence of the same cravings for sin in the soul which causes combination in wrongdoing.",
+                "[11] Indeed men who have lost their tongue by mutilation do by means of nods and glances and the other attitudes and movements of the body indicate their wishes as well as the uttered word can do it. Besides a single nation in which not only language but laws and modes of life are identical often reaches such a pitch of wickedness that its misdeeds can balance the sins of the whole of mankind.",
+                "[12] Again multitudes through ignorance of other languages have failed to foresee the impending danger, and thus been caught unawares by the attacking force, while on the contrary such a knowledge has enabled them to repel the alarms and dangers which menaced them. The conclusion is that the possession of a common language does more good than harm—a conclusion confirmed by all past experience which shews that in every country, particularly where the population is indigenous, nothing has kept the inhabitants so free from disaster as uniformity of language.",
+                "[13] Further the acquisition of languages other than his own at once gives a man a high standing with those who know and speak them. They now consider him a friendly person, who brings no small evidence of fellow-feeling in his familiarity with their vocabulary, since that familiarity seems to render them secure against the chance of meeting any disastrous injury at his hands. Why then, they ask, did God wish to deprive mankind of its universal language as though it were a source of evil, when He should rather have established it firmly as a source of the utmost profit?"
+            ],
+            [
+                "[14] Those who take the letter of the law in its outward sense and provide for each question as it arises the explanation which lies on the surface, will no doubt refute on their own principles the authors of these insidious criticisms. But we shall take the line of allegorical interpretation not in any contentious spirit, nor seeking some means of meeting sophistry with sophistry. Rather we shall follow the chain of logical sequence, which does not admit of stumbling but easily removes any obstructions and thus allows the argument to march to its conclusion with unfaltering steps.",
+                "[15] We suggest then that by the words “the earth was all one lip and one voice” is meant a consonance of evil deeds great and innumerable, and these include the injuries which cities and nations and countries inflict and retaliate, as well as the impious deeds which men commit, not only against each other, but against the Deity. These indeed are the wrongdoings of multitudes. But we consider also the vast multitude of ills which are found in the individual man, especially when the unison of voices within him is a disharmony tuneless and unmusical."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[16] Who does not know the calamities of fortune when poverty and disrepute combine with disease or disablement in the body, and these again are mixed with the infirmities of a soul rendered distracted by melancholy or senility, or any other grievous misfortune?",
+                "[17] For indeed a single item of this list is enough to upset and overthrow even the very stoutest, if it brings its force to bear upon him. But when the ills of body and soul and the external world unite and in serried mass, as though obedient to a single commanding voice, bear down at the same moment upon their lone victim, what misery is not insignificant beside them? When the guards fall, that which they guard must fall too.",
+                "[18] Now the guards of the body are wealth and reputation and honours, who keep it erect and lift it on high and give it a sense of pride, just as their opposites, dishonour, disrepute and poverty are like foes who bring it crashing to the ground.",
+                "[19] Again the guards of the soul are the powers of hearing and sight and smell and taste, and the whole company of the senses and besides them health and strength of body and limb and muscle. For these serve as fortresses well-walled and stayed on firm foundations, houses within which the mind can range and dwell rejoicing, with none to hinder it from following the urges of its personality, but with free passage everywhere as on easy and open high roads.",
+                "[20] But against these guards also are posted hostile forces, disablement of the sense-organs and disease, as I have said, which often bid fair to carry the understanding over the precipice in their arms.",
+                "While these calamities of fortune which work independently of us are full of pain and misery, they are far outweighed in comparison with those which spring from our deliberate volition."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[21] Let us turn, then, to where the voice of unison is the voice of our self-caused ills and consider it in its turn. Our soul, we are told, is tripartite, having one part assigned to the mind and reason, one to the spirited element and one to the appetites. There is mischief working in them all, in each in relation to itself, in all in relation to each other, when the mind reaps what is sown by its follies and acts of cowardice and intemperance and injustice, and the spirited part brings to the birth its fierce and raging furies and the other evil children of its womb, and the appetite sends forth on every side desires ever winged by childish fancy, desires which light as chance directs on things material and immaterial.",
+                "[22] For then, as though on a ship crew, passengers and steersmen had conspired through some madness to sink it, the first to perish with the boat are those who planned its destruction. It stands alone as the most grievous of mischiefs and one almost past all cure—this co-operation of all the parts of the soul in sin, where, as when a nation is plague-stricken, none can have the health to heal the sufferers, but the physicians share the sickness of the common herd who lie crushed by the pestilential scourge, victims of a calamity which none can ignore.",
+                "[23] We have a symbol of this dire happening in the great deluge described in the words of the lawgiver, when the “cataracts of heaven” poured forth the torrents of absolute wickedness in impetuous downfall and the “fountains from the earth,” that is from the body (Gen. 7:11), spouted forth the streams of each passion, streams many and great, and these, uniting and commingling with the rainpour, in wild commotion eddied and swirled continually through the whole region of the soul which formed their meeting-place.",
+                "[24] “For the Lord God,” it runs, “seeing that the wickednesses of men were multiplied on the earth, and that every man carefully purposed in his heart evil things every day,” determined to punish man, that is the mind, for his deadly misdeeds, together with the creeping and flying creatures around him and the other unreasoning multitude of untamed beasts (Gen. 6:5–6). This punishment was the deluge.",
+                "[25] For the deluge was a letting loose of sins, a rushing torrent of iniquity where there was naught to hinder, but all things burst forth without restraint to supply abundant opportunities to those who were all readiness to take pleasure therein. And surely this punishment was suitable. For not one part only of the soul had been corrupted, so that it might be saved through the soundness of others, but nothing in it was left free from disease and corruption. For “seeing,” as the scripture says, that “everyone,” that is every thought and not one only, “purposed,” the upright judge awarded the penalty which the fault deserved."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[26] These are they who made a confederacy at the salt ravine. For the place of vices and passions is hollow and rough and ravine-like; salt indeed, and bitter are the pangs which it brings. The covenant of alliance which they swore was destroyed by wise Abraham, for he knew that it had not the sanctity of oaths or covenant-rites. Thus we read “all these joined their voices to come to the salt-ravine; this is the salt sea” (Gen. 14:3).",
+                "[27] Observe further those who were barren of wisdom and blind in the understanding which should naturally be sharp of sight, their qualities veiled under their name of Sodomite—how the whole people from the young men to the eldest ran round and round the house of the soul to bring dishonour and ruin on those sacred and holy Thoughts which were its guests, its guardians and sentinels; how not a single one is minded to oppose the unjust or shrink from doing injustice himself.",
+                "[28] For we read that not merely some but the “whole people surrounded the house, both young and old” (Gen. 19:4), conspiring against the divine and holy Thoughts, who are often called angels."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[29] But Moses the prophet of God shall meet and stem the strong current of their boldness, though, setting before them as their king their boldest and most cunning eloquence, they come rushing with united onset, though they mass their wealth of water and their tide is as the tide of a river. “Behold,” he says, “the King of Egypt comes to the water, but thou shalt stand meeting him at the edge of the river” (Ex. 7:15).",
+                "[30] The fool, then, will go forth to the rushing flood of the iniquities and passions, which Moses likens to a river. But the wise man in the first place gains a privilege vouchsafed to him from God, who ever stands fast, a privilege which is the congener of His power which never swerves and never wavers.",
+                "[31] For it was said to him “Stand thou here with me” (Deut. 5:31), to the end that he should put off doubt and hesitation, the qualities of the unstable mind, and put on that surest and most stable quality, faith. This is his first privilege—to stand; but secondly—strange paradox—he “meets.” For “thou shalt stand meeting” says the text, though “meet” involves the idea of motion and “stand” calls up the thought of rest.",
+                "[32] Yet the two things here spoken of are not really in conflict, but in most natural sequence to each other. For he whose constitution of mind and judgement is tranquil and firmly established will be found to oppose all those who rejoice in surge and tumult and manufacture the storm to disturb his natural capacity for calmness."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[33] It is well indeed that the opponents should meet on the lip or edge of the river. The lips are the boundaries of the mouth and a kind of hedge to the tongue and through them the stream of speech passes, when it begins its downward flow.",
+                "[34] Now speech is an ally employed by those who hate virtue and love the passions to inculcate their untenable tenets, and also by men of worth for the destruction of such doctrines and to set up beyond resistance the sovereignty of those that are better, those in whose goodness there is no deceit.",
+                "[35] When, indeed, after they have let out every reef of contentious sophistry, the opposing onset of the sage’s speech has overturned their bark and sent them to perdition, he will, as is just and fit, set in order his holy choir to sing the anthem of victory, and sweet is the melody of that song.",
+                "[36] For Israel, it says, saw the Egyptians dead on the edge of the sea (Ex. 14:30)—not elsewhere. And when he says “dead” he does not mean the death which is the separation of soul and body, but the destruction of unholy doctrines and of the words which their mouth and tongue and the other vocal organs gave them to use.",
+                "[37] Now the death of words is silence, not the silence which well-behaved people cultivate, regarding it as a sign of modesty, for that silence is actually a power, sister to the power of speech, husbanding the fitting words till the moment for utterance comes. No, it is the undesired silence to which those whom the strength of their opponent has reduced to exhaustion and prostration must submit, when they find no longer any argument ready to their hand.",
+                "[38] For what they handle dissolves in their hands, and what they stand on gives way beneath them, so that they must needs fall before they stand. You might compare the treadmill which is used for drawing water. In the middle are some steps and on these the labourer, when he wants to water the fields, sets his feet but cannot help slipping off, and to save himself from continually falling he grasps with his hands some firm object nearby and holding tight to it uses it as a suspender for his whole body. And so his feet serve him for hands and his hands for feet, for he keeps himself standing with the hands which we use for work, and works with his feet, on which he would naturally stand."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[39] Now there are many who though they have not the capacity to demolish by sheer force the plausible inventions of the sophists, because their occupation has lain continuously in active life and thus they are not trained in any high degree to deal with words, find refuge in the support of the solely Wise Being and beseech Him to become their helper. Such a one is the disciple of Moses who prays thus in the Psalms: “Let their cunning lips become speechless” (Ps. 30 [31] 19). And how should such lips be silent, unless they were bridled by Him who alone holds speech itself as His vassal?",
+                "[40] Let us flee, then, without a backward glance from the unions which are unions for sin, but hold fast to our alliance with the comrades of good sense and knowledge.",
+                "[41] And therefore when I hear those who say “We are all sons of one man, we are peaceful” (Gen. 42:11), I am filled with admiration for the harmonious concert which their words reveal. “Ah! my friends,” I would say, “how should you not hate war and love peace—you who have enrolled yourselves as children of one and the same Father, who is not mortal but immortal—God’s Man, who being the Word of the Eternal must needs himself be imperishable?”",
+                "[42] Those whose system includes many origins for the family of the soul, who affiliate themselves to that evil thing called polytheism, who take in hand to render homage some to this deity, some to that, are the authors of tumult and strife at home and abroad, and fill the whole of life from birth to death with internecine wars.",
+                "[43] But those who rejoice in the oneness of their blood and honour one father, right reason, reverence that concert of virtues, which is full of harmony and melody, and live a life of calmness and fair weather. And yet that life is not, as some suppose, an idle and ignoble life, but one of high courage, and the edge of its spirit is exceeding sharp to fight against those who attempt to break treaties and ever practise the violation of the vows they have sworn. For it is the nature of men of peace that they prove to be men of war, when they take the field and resist those who would subvert the stability of the soul."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[44] The truth of my words is attested first by the consciousness of every virtue-lover, which feels what I have described, and secondly by a chorister of the prophetic company, who possessed by divine inspiration spoke thus: “O my mother, how great didst thou bear me, a man of combat and a man of displeasure in all the earth! I did not owe, nor did they owe to me, nor did my strength fail from their curses” (Jer. 15:10).",
+                "[45] Yes, is not every wise man the mortal foe of every fool, a foe who is equipped not with triremes or engines, or body-armour or soldiers for his defence, but with reasonings only?",
+                "[46] For who, when he sees that war, which amid the fullest peace is waged among all men continuously, phase ever succeeding phase, in private and public life, a war in which the combatants are not just nations and countries, or cities and villages, but also house against house and each particular man against himself, who, I say, does not exhort, reproach, admonish, correct by day and night alike, since his soul cannot rest, because its nature is to hate evil? For all the deeds of war are done in peace.",
+                "[47] Men plunder, rob, kidnap, spoil, sack, outrage, maltreat, violate, dishonour and commit murder sometimes by treachery, or if they be stronger without disguise.",
+                "[48] Every man sets before him money or reputation as his aim, and at this he directs all the actions of his life like arrows against a target. He takes no heed of equity, but pursues the inequitable. He eschews thoughts of fellowship, and his eager desire is that the wealth of all should be gathered in his single purse. He hates others, whether his hate be returned or not. His benevolence is hypocrisy. He is hand and glove with canting flattery, at open war with genuine friendship; an enemy to truth, a defender of falsehood, slow to help, quick to harm, ever forward to slander, backward to champion the accused, skilful to cozen, false to his oath, faithless to his promise, a slave to anger, a thrall to pleasure, protector of the bad, corrupter of the good."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[49] These and the like are the much-coveted treasures of the peace which men admire and praise so loudly—treasures enshrined in the mind of every fool with wonder and veneration. But to every wise man they are, as they should be, a source of pain, and often will he say to his mother and nurse, wisdom, “O mother, how great didst thou bear me!” Great, not in power of body, but in strength to hate evil, a man of displeasure and combat, by nature a man of peace, but for this very cause also a man of war against those who dishonour the much-prized loveliness of peace.",
+                "[50] “I did not owe nor did they owe to me,” for neither did they use the good I had to give, nor I their evil, but, as Moses wrote, “I received from none of them what they desired” (Num. 16:15). For all that comes under the head of their desire they kept as treasure to themselves, believing that to be the greatest blessing which was the supreme mischief.",
+                "[51] “Nor did my strength fail from the curses which they laid upon me,” but with all my might and main I clung to the divine truths; I did not bend under their ill-treatment, but used my strength to reproach those who refused to effect their own purification.",
+                "[52] For “God has set us up for a contradiction to our neighbours,” as is said in a verse of the Psalms (Ps. 79 [80] 7); us, that is all who desire right judgement. Yes, surely they are by nature men of contradiction, all who have ever been zealous for knowledge and virtue, who contend jealously with the “neighbours” of the soul; who test the pleasures which share our home, the desires which live at our side, our fears and faintings of heart, and put to shame the tribe of passions and vices. Further, they test also every sense, the eyes on what they see, the ears on what they hear, the sense of smell on its perfumes, the taste on its flavours, the touch on the characteristics which mark the qualities of substances as they come in contact with it. And lastly they test the utterance on the statements which it has been led to make.",
+                "[53] For what our senses perceive, or our speech expresses, or our emotion causes us to feel, and how or why each result is attained, are matters which we should scrutinize carefully and expose every error that we find.",
+                "[54] He who contradicts none of these, but assents to all as they come before him, is unconsciously deceiving himself and raising up a stronghold of dangerous neighbours to menace the soul, neighbours who should be dealt with as subjects, not as rulers. For if they have the mastery, since folly is their king, the mischief they work will be great and manifold; but as subjects they will render due service and obey the rein, and chafe no more against the yoke.",
+                "[55] And, when these have thus learnt the lesson of obedience, and those have assumed the command which not only knowledge but power has given them, all the thoughts that attend and guard the soul will be one in purpose and approaching Him that ranks highest among them will speak thus: “Thy servants have taken the sum of the men of war who were with us, and there is no discordant voice” (Num. 31:49). “We,” they will continue, “like instruments of music where all the notes are in perfect tune, echo with our voices all the lessons we have received. We speak no word and do no deed that is harsh or grating, and thus we have made a laughing-stock of all that other dead and voiceless choir, the choir of those who know not the muse, the choir which hymns Midian, the nurse of things bodily, and her offspring, the heavy leathern weight whose name is Baal-Peor.",
+                "[56] For we are the ‘race of the Chosen ones of that Israel’ who sees God, ‘and there is none amongst us of discordant voice’ ” (Ex. 24:11), that so the whole world, which is the instrument of the All, may be filled with the sweet melody of its undiscording harmonies.",
+                "[57] And therefore too Moses tells us how peace was assigned as the prize of that most warlike reason, called Phinehas (Num. 25:12), because, inspired with zeal for virtue and waging war against vice, he ripped open all created being; how in their turn that prize is given to those who, after diligent and careful scrutiny, following the more certain testimony of sight, rather than hearing, have the will to accept the faith that mortality is full of unfaith and clings only to the seeming.",
+                "[58] Wonderful then indeed is the symphony of voices here described, but most wonderful of all, exceeding every harmony, is that united universal symphony in which we find the whole people declaring with one heart, “All that God hath said we will do and hear” (Ex. 19:8).",
+                "[59] Here the precentor whom they follow is no longer the Word, but God the Sovereign of all, for whose sake they become quicker to meet the call to action than the call of words. For other men act after they have heard, but these under the divine inspiration say—strange inversion—that they will act first and hear afterwards, that so they may be seen to go forward to deeds of excellence, not led by teaching or instruction, but through the self-acting, self-dictated instinct of their own hearts. And when they have <i>done</i>, then, as they say, they will <i>hear</i>, that so they may judge their actions, whether they chime with the divine words and the sacred admonitions."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[60] Now those who conspired for iniquities, “moved,” we are told, “from the ‘east’ (or ‘rising’) and found a plain in the land of Shinar and dwelt there” (Gen. 11:2). How true to nature! For there are two kinds of “rising” in the soul, the better and the worse. The better is when the beam of the virtues rises like the rays of the sun; the worse when virtues pass into the shadow and vices rise above the horizon.",
+                "[61] We have an example of the former in these words: “And God planted a pleasaunce in Eden towards the sun-rise” (Gen. 2:8). That garden was not a garden of the plants of the soil, but of heavenly virtues, which out of His own incorporeal light the Planter brought to their rising, never to be extinguished.",
+                "[62] I have heard also an oracle from the lips of one of the disciples of Moses, which runs thus: “Behold a man whose name is the rising” (Zech. 6:12), strangest of titles, surely, if you suppose that a being composed of soul and body is here described. But if you suppose that it is that Incorporeal one, who differs not a whit from the divine image, you will agree that the name of “rising” assigned to him quite truly describes him.",
+                "[63] For that man is the eldest son, whom the Father of all raised up, and elsewhere calls him His first-born, and indeed the Son thus begotten followed the ways of his Father, and shaped the different kinds, looking to the archetypal patterns which that Father supplied."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[64] Of the worse kind of rising we have an example in the description of him who wished to curse one who was praised by God. For he too is represented as dwelling at the “rising,” and this rising though it bears the same name as the other is in direct conflict with it.",
+                "[65] “Balak,” we read, “sent for me from Mesopotamia from the mountains from the rising saying, ‘Come hither, curse for me him whom God does not curse’ ” (Num. 23:7, 8). Now Balak is by interpretation “foolish,” and the interpretation is most true. For surely it were the pitch of folly to hope that the Existent should be deceived, and that His surest purpose should be upset by the devices of men?",
+                "[66] And this is the reason why Balaam also dwells in “Mid-river-land,” for his understanding is submerged in the midmost depths of a river, unable to swim its way upward and lift its head above the surface. This condition is the rising of folly and the setting of reasonableness.",
+                "[67] Now these makers of a music whose harmony is disharmony, moved, we are told, “from the rising.” Is it the rising of virtue that is meant, or the rising of vice? If the former, the movement suggested is one of complete severance. But if it is the latter, it is what we may call an united movement, as when we move our hands, not apart or in isolation, but in connexion and accordance with the whole body.",
+                "[68] For the place where vice is located serves as the initial starting-point to the fool for those activities which defy nature.",
+                "Now all who have wandered away from virtue and accepted the starting-points of folly, find and dwell in a most suitable place, a place which in the Hebrew tongue is called Shinar and in our own “shaking out.”",
+                "[69] For all the life of the fools is torn and hustled and shaken, ever in chaos and disturbance, and keeping no trace of genuine good treasured within it. For just as things which are shaken off all fall out, if not held fast through being part of a unified body, so too I think, when a man has conspired for wrongdoing, his soul is subject to a “shaking out,” for it casts away every form of good so that no shadow or semblance of it can be seen at all."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[70] We have example in the Egyptians, the representatives of those who love the body, who are shewn to us as flying not from the water, but “under the water,” that is under the stream of the passions, and when they are submerged therein they are shaken and wildly disordered; they cast away the stability and peacefulness of virtue and take upon them the confusion of vice. For we are told, “that he shook off the Egyptians in the midst of the sea, fleeing under the water” (Ex. 14:27).",
+                "[71] These are they who know not even Joseph, the many-sided pride of worldly life, and give way to their sins without veil or disguise, husbanding no vestige or shadow or semblance of honourable living.",
+                "[72] For there rose up, we are told, another King over Egypt, who “knew not” even “Joseph” (Ex. 1:8)—the good that is, which is given by the senses, the last and latest in the scale of goods. It is this same King who would destroy not only all perfection but all progress; not only the clear vision such as comes of sight, but the instruction also that comes of hearing. He says, “Come hither, curse me Jacob, and come hither, send thy curses upon Israel” (Num. 23:7), and that is equivalent to “Put an end to them both, the soul’s sight and the soul’s hearing, that it may neither see nor hear any true and genuine excellence.” For Israel is the type of seeing, and Jacob of hearing.",
+                "[73] The mind of such as these is in a sense shaken and casts forth the whole nature of good, while the mind of the virtuous in contrast claims as its own the Idea of the good, an Idea pure and unalloyed, and shakes and casts off what is worthless.",
+                "[74] Thus mark how the Man of Practice speaks: “Take away the alien gods who are with you from the midst of you, and purify yourselves and change your raiment and let us rise up and go up to Bethel” (Gen. 35:2, 3), so that, even though Laban demand a search, no idols may be found in all the house (Gen. 31:35) but veritable substantial realities graven, as though on stone, on the heart of the wise, realities which are the heritage of the self-taught nature, Isaac. For Isaac alone receives from his father the “real substance” (Gen. 25:5)."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[75] Again observe that he does not say that they <i>came</i> to the plain in which they stayed, but that only after full search and exploration they <i>found</i> the spot which was the fittest for folly. For indeed every fool does not just take to him what another gives, but he seeks for evil and discovers it. He is not content with the evils only to which depravity proceeds in its natural course, but adds the perfected efforts of the artist in wickedness.",
+                "[76] And would that he might only stay for a while among them and then change his habitation, but as it is he determines to abide there. For they “found,” we are told, “the plain and dwelt there,” as though it were their fatherland. They did not sojourn there as on a foreign soil. For it were a less grievous thing if when they fell in with sins, they should count them strangers and outlanders as it were, instead of holding them to be of their own household and kin. For were it a passing visit they would have departed in course of time; their dwelling there was a sure evidence of a permanent stay.",
+                "[77] This is why all whom Moses calls wise are represented as sojourners. Their souls are never colonists leaving heaven for a new home. Their way is to visit earthly nature as men who travel abroad to see and learn.",
+                "[78] So when they have stayed awhile in their bodies, and beheld through them all that sense and mortality has to shew, they make their way back to the place from which they set out at the first. To them the heavenly region, where their citizenship lies, is their native land; the earthly region in which they became sojourners is a foreign country. For surely, when men found a colony, the land which receives them becomes their native land instead of the mother city, but to the traveller abroad the land which sent him forth is still the mother to whom also he yearns to return.",
+                "[79] We shall not be surprised, then, to find Abraham, when he rose from the life of death and vanity, saying to the guardians of the dead and stewards of mortality, “I am a stranger and sojourner with you” (Gen. 23:4). “You,” he means, “are children of the soil who honour the dust and clay before the soul and have adjudged the precedence to the man named Ephron, which being interpreted is ‘clay.’ ”",
+                "[80] And just as natural are the words of the Practiser Jacob, when he laments his sojourn in the body. “The days of the years of my life, the days which I sojourn, have been few and evil, they have not reached to the days of my fathers which they sojourned” (Gen. 47:9).",
+                "[81] Isaac, too, the self-taught had an oracle vouchsafed to him thus, “Go not down into Egypt,” that is passion, “but dwell in the land which I say to thee” (that is in the wisdom which has no material body, and none can shew it to another), “and sojourn in this land” (Gen. 26:2, 3), that is in that form of existence which may be shewn and is perceived by the senses. The purpose of this is to shew him that the wise man does but sojourn in this body which our senses know, as in a strange land, but dwells in and has for his fatherland the virtues known through the mind, which God “speaks” and which thus are identical with divine words.",
+                "[82] But Moses says, “I am an outlander in the alien land” (Ex. 2:22). Thus he uses stronger terms. His tenancy of the body is not to him merely that of the foreigner as immigrant settlers count it. To alienate himself from it, never to count it as his own, is, he holds, to give it its due."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[83] Now the wicked man wishes to display his unity of voice and speech through fellowship in unjust deeds rather than in actual words, and therefore begins to build a city and a tower which will serve for the hold of vice, as a citadel for a despot. He exhorts all those who form his company to take their share in the work, but first to prepare the suitable material.",
+                "[84] “Come,” he says, “let us make bricks and bake them with fire” (Gen. 11:3). The meaning of this is as follows. At present we have all the contents of the soul in inextricable confusion, so that no clear form of any particular kind is discernible.",
+                "[85] Our right course is to take the passion and vice, which at present is a substance devoid of form and quality, and divide it by continuous analysis into the proper categories and the subdivisions in regular descending order till we reach the ultimate; thus we shall obtain both a clearer apprehension of them and that experienced use and enjoyment which is calculated to multiply our pleasure and delight.",
+                "[86] Forward then, come as senators to the council-hall of the soul, all you reasonings which are ranged together for the destruction of righteousness and every virtue, and let us carefully consider how our attack may succeed.",
+                "[87] The firmest foundations for such success will be to give form to the formless by assigning them definite shapes and figures and to distinguish them in each case by separate limitations, not with the uncertain equilibrium of the halting, but firmly planted, assimilated to the nature of the square—that most stable of figures—and thus rooted brick-like in unwavering equilibrium they will form a secure support for the superstructure."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[88] Every mind that sets itself up against God, the mind which we call “King of Egypt,” that is of the body, proves to be a maker of such structures. For Moses describes Pharoah as rejoicing in buildings constructed of brick.",
+                "[89] This is natural, for when the workman has taken the two substances of earth and water, one solid and the other liquid, but both in the process of dissolution or destruction, and by mixing them has produced a third on the boundary line between the two, called clay, he divides it up into portions and without interruption gives each of the sections its proper shape. He wishes thus to make them firmer and more manageable since this, he knows, is the easiest way to secure the completion of the building.",
+                "[90] This process is copied by the naturally depraved, when they first mix the unreasoning and exuberant impulses of passion with the gravest vices, and then divide the mixture into its kinds, sense into sight and hearing, and again into taste and smell and touch; passion into pleasure and lust, and fear and grief; vices in general into folly, profligacy, cowardice, injustice, and the other members of that fraternity and family—the materials which moulded and shaped, to the misery and sorrow of their builders, will form the fort which towers aloft to menace the soul."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[91] Ere now, too, there have been those who went to a further extreme, and not only worked up their own souls to do thus, but have violently forced their betters, the children of the race that has vision, to make bricks under duress and build strong cities (Ex. 1:11) for the mind which thinks itself their sovereign. They wished in this way to shew that good is the slave of evil and passion stronger than the higher emotions, that prudence and every virtue are subject to folly and all vice, and thus must render obedience to every command of the despotic power.",
+                "[92] “Behold,” says the enemy, “the eye of the soul so translucent, so pure, so keen of vision, the eye which alone is permitted to look on God, the eye whose name is Israel, is imprisoned after all in the gross material nets of Egypt and submits to do the bidding of an iron tyranny, to work at brick and every earthy substance with labour painful and unremitting.” It is but natural that Israel should sorrow and groan because of them; for the one solitary thing which he still treasures as a jewel amid his sufferings is that he can weep sore for his present state.",
+                "[93] There is sound wisdom in the words, “The children of Israel groaned because of their tasks” (Ex. 2:23). Which of the wisely-minded, when he sees the tasks which many men endure and the extravagance of the zeal which they commonly put forth to win money or glory or the enjoyment which pleasure give, would not in the exceeding bitterness of his heart cry aloud to God the only Saviour to lighten their tasks and provide a price of the soul’s salvation to redeem it into liberty?",
+                "[94] What then is the liberty which is really sure and stable? Aye, what? It is the service of the only wise Being, as the oracles testify, in which it is said, “Send forth the people that they may serve me” (Ex. 8:1).",
+                "[95] But it is the special mark of those who serve the Existent, that theirs are not the tasks of cupbearers or bakers or cooks, or any other tasks of the earth earthy, nor do they mould or fashion material forms like the brick-makers, but in their thoughts ascend to the heavenly height, setting before them Moses, the nature beloved of God, to lead them on the way.",
+                "[96] For then they shall behold the place which in fact is the Word, where stands God the never changing, never swerving, and also what lies under his feet like “the work of a brick of sapphire, like the form of the firmament of the heaven” (Ex. 24:10), even the world of our senses, which he indicates in this mystery.",
+                "[97] For it well befits those who have entered into comradeship with knowledge to desire to see the Existent if they may, but, if they cannot, to see at any rate his image, the most holy Word, and after the Word its most perfect work of all that our senses know, even this world. For by philosophy nothing else has ever been meant, than the earnest desire to see these things exactly as they are."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[98] But when he speaks of the world of our senses as God’s footstool, it is for these reasons. First to shew that not in creation is to be found the cause which made it; secondly to make it plain that even the whole world does not move at its own free unshackled will, but is the standing-ground of God who steers and pilots in safety all that is. And yet to say that He uses hands or feet or any created part at all is not the true account. For God is not as man (Num. 23:19). It is but the form employed merely for our instruction because we cannot get outside ourselves, but frame our conceptions of the Uncreated from our own experience.",
+                "[99] It is a fine saying when by way of illustration he speaks of the world as an appearance of brick. It does seem to stand fast and firm like a brick as we judge it when our outward sight comes in contact with it, but its actual movement is exceeding swift, outstripping all particular movements.",
+                "[100] To our bodily eyes the sun by day and the moon by night present the appearance of standing still. Yet we all know that the rapidity of the course on which they are carried is unapproached, since they traverse the whole heaven in a single day. So too also the whole heaven itself appears to stand still but actually revolves, and this motion is apprehended by the eye which is itself invisible and closer akin to the divine—the eye of the understanding."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[101] When they are described as using fire with lot their bricks, it is a symbolical way of saying that they hardened and strengthened their passions and vices by the heat and high pressure of argument, to prevent their ever being demolished by the guards of wisdom, who are ever forging engines to subvert them.",
+                "[102] And therefore we have the addition, “their brick became stone to them” (Gen. 11:3). For the looseness and incoherence of the talk which streams along unsupported by reason turns into a solid and resisting substance, when it gains density and compactness through powerful reasonings and convincing demonstrations. The power of apprehending conclusions grows, so to speak, to manhood, whereas in its childhood it is fluid through the humidity of the soul, which is unable as yet to harden and thus retain the impressions which are stamped upon it.",
+                "[103] “And the asphalt was clay to them” (<i>ibid</i>.). Not the reverse, their clay was asphalt. The wicked may seem to make the weak cause strong against the better, and to harden the loose stuff which exudes from the weak, to obtain a firm footing from which to shoot their bolts against virtue. But the Father of excellence in His loving-kindness will not suffer the platform to reach the condition of cement which defies dissolution, but makes the unsubstantial result of their fluid industry to be but as sloppy clay.",
+                "[104] For if the clay had become asphalt, what is now a piece of earth in constant flux and perceived only by the outward sense might have won its way in complete triumph to power fast-cemented and irremovable. But since the reverse has come to pass and the asphalt has changed to clay, we must not lose heart, for there is hope, aye hope, that the stout supports of vice may fall beneath the axe of God’s might.",
+                "[105] So it was with just Noah. In the great ceaseless deluge of life, while he is as yet unable to behold existences as they really are through the soul alone apart from sense, he will “coat the ark,” I mean the body, “with asphalt within and without” (Gen. 6:14), thus strengthening the impressions and activities of which the body is the medium. But when the trouble has abated and the rush of the waters stayed, he will come forth and employ his understanding, free from the body, for the apprehension of truth.",
+                "[106] On the other hand the mind called Moses, that goodly plant, given the name of goodly at his very birth (Ex. 2:2), who in virtue of his larger citizenship took the world for his township and country, weeps bitterly (Ex. 2:6) in the days when he is imprisoned in the ark of the body bedaubed as with “asphalt-pitch” (Ex. 2:3), which thinks to receive and contain, as with cement, impressions of all that is presented through sense. He weeps for his captivity, pressed sore by his yearning for a nature that knows no body. He weeps also for the mind of the multitude, so erring, so vanity-ridden, so miserable—the mind which clings to false opinion and thinks that itself, or any created being at all, possesses aught that is firm, fast-cemented and immutably established, whereas all that is fixed and permanent in circumstances and condition is graven as on stone in the keeping of God alone."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[107] The words, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city and a tower whose head shall be unto heaven,” suggest such thoughts as these. The lawgiver thinks that besides those cities which are built by men’s hands upon the earth, of which the materials are stones and timber, there are others, even those which men carry about established in their souls.",
+                "[108] Naturally these last are models or archetypes, for the workmanship bestowed upon them is of a more divine kind, while the former are copies composed of perishing material. Of the soul-city there are two kinds, one better, the other worse. The better adopts as its constitution democracy, which honours equality and has law and justice for its rulers—such a one is as a melody which sings God’s praises. The worse, which corrupts and adulterates the better, as the false counterfeit coin corrupts the currency, is mob-rule, which takes inequality for its ideal, and in it injustice and lawlessness are paramount.",
+                "[109] The good have their names entered on the burgess-roll of the former type of state, but the multitude of the wicked are embraced under the second and baser type, for they love disorder rather than order, confusion rather than fixedness and stability.",
+                "[110] The fool not content with using himself alone thinks fit to use fellow-workers in sin. He calls upon the sight and the hearing and invokes every sense to range itself beside him without delay, each bringing all the instruments that are needed for the service. And further he spurs and incites that other company, the company of the passions, to put their untutored nature under training and practice and thus render themselves resistless.",
+                "[111] These allies, then, the mind summons, saying, “Let us build ourselves a city,” which means, “Let us fortify our resources and fence them in with strength, that we may not fall easy victims to the onset of the foe. Let us mete out and distribute the several powers of the soul as by wards and tithings, allotting some to the reasoning and some to the unreasoning portion.",
+                "[112] Let us choose for our magistrates such as are able to provide wealth, reputation, honours, pleasures, from every source available to them. Let us enact laws which shall eject from our community the justice whose product is poverty and disrepute—laws which shall assure the emoluments of the stronger to the succession of those whose powers of acquisition are greater than others.",
+                "[113] And let a tower be built as a citadel, as a royal and impregnable castle for the despot vice. Let its feet walk upon the earth and its head reach to heaven, carried by our vaulting ambition to that vast height.”",
+                "[114] For in fact that tower not only has human misdeeds for its base, but it seeks to rise to the region of celestial things, with the arguments of impiety and godlessness in its van. Such are its pronouncements, either that the Deity does not exist, or that it exists but does not exert providence, or that the world had no beginning in which it was created, or that though created its course is under the sway of varying and random causation, sometimes leading it amiss, though sometimes no fault can be found. For this last an analogy is often seen in ships and chariots.",
+                "[115] For the course of the one on the water and of the other on land often goes straight without helmsman or charioteer. But providence demands, they say, more than a rare and occasional success. Human providence frequently achieves its purpose, the divine should do so always and without exception, since error is admitted to be inconsistent with divine power.",
+                "Further, when these victims of delusion build up under the symbol of a tower their argument of vice, what is their object but to leave a record of their ill-savoured name?"
+            ],
+            [
+                "[116] For they say, “let us make our name.” What monstrous and extravagant shamelessness! What is this you say? You ought to be hiding your misdeeds in night and profound darkness, and to have taken, if not true shame, at least the simulation of it to veil them, whether to keep the goodwill of the more decent sort, or to escape the punishments which wait on open sins. Instead, to such a pitch of impudent hardihood have you come, that you not only let the full sunlight shine upon you and fear neither the threats of better men, nor the inexorable judgements of God, which confront the authors of such unholy deeds, but you also deliberately send to every part rumours to report the misdeeds of which you yourselves are guilty, that none may fail to learn and hear the story of your shameless crimes. O wretched, utter miscreants!",
+                "[117] What sort of name, then, do you desire? Is it the name that best befits your deeds? Is it one name only? One general name perhaps, but a thousand specific ones, which you will hear from the lips of others even if your own are silent. Recklessness with shamelessness, insolence with violence, violence with murder, seductions with adulteries, unbridled lust with unmeasured pleasures, desperation with foolhardiness, injustice with knavery, thefts with robbery, perjuries with falsehoods, impieties with law-breakings, these and the like are the names for such deeds as yours.",
+                "[118] It is indeed a fine cause for pride and boasting, when you pursue so eagerly the repute which these names give, names at which you should in all reason hide your heads for shame.",
+                "With some indeed their pride in these names comes from the belief that they have gained invincible strength by the fact that all men think them such, and these God’s minister Justice will punish for their great audacity. Though perhaps they have not merely a presentiment, but a clear foresight of their own destruction. For they say, “before we are dispersed” (Gen. 11:4) let us take thought for our name and glory.",
+                "[119] Do you then know, I would say to them, that you will be scattered? Why then do you sin? But surely it bespeaks the mind of fools that they do not shrink from iniquity, though the gravest penalties often menace them, openly and not obscurely. The punishments of God’s visitation may be thought to be hidden from our sight, but they are really well known.",
+                "[120] For all, however wicked, receive some general notions to the effect that their iniquity will not pass unseen by God, and that they cannot altogether evade the necessity of being brought to judgement.",
+                "[121] Otherwise how do they know that they will be scattered? They certainly do say, “before we are dispersed.” But it is the conscience within which convicts them and pricks them in spite of the exceeding godlessness of their lives, thus drawing them on reluctantly to assent to the truth that all human doings are surveyed by a superior being and that there awaits them an incorruptible avenger, even justice, who hates the unjust deeds of the impious and the arguments which advocate those deeds."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[122] But all these are descended from the depravity which is ever dying and never dead, whose name is Cain. Is not Cain, when he had begotten a son whom he called Enoch, described as founding a city to bear his son’s name (Gen. 4:17), and thus in a sense raising a building of created and mortal things to subvert those to which has fallen the honour to be the work of a diviner architect?",
+                "[123] For Enoch is by interpretation “thy gift,” and each of the unholy thinks that his understanding gives him his apprehension and reflections, that his eyes give him sight, his ears hearing, his nostrils smell, and the other senses the functions that belong to themselves severally, and again that the vocal organs give him speech, but God, he thinks, is either not the cause in any sense or not the first cause.",
+                "[124] And therefore Cain retained in his own keeping the firstlings of the fruits of his husbandry and offered, as we are told, merely the fruits at a later time, although he had beside him a wholesome example. For his brother brought to the altar the first-born younglings of the flock, not the after-born, thus confessing that even the causes which come higher in the chain of causation owe their existence to the Cause which is highest and first of all.",
+                "[125] The impious man thinks the opposite, that the mind has sovereign power over what it plans, and sense over what it perceives. He holds that the latter judges material things and the former all things, and that both are free from fault or error.",
+                "[126] And yet what could be more blameworthy or more clearly convicted of falsehood by the truth than these beliefs? Is not the mind constantly convicted of delusion on numberless points, and all the senses judged guilty of false witness, not before unreasoning judges who may easily be deceived, but at the bar of nature herself whom it is fundamentally impossible to corrupt?",
+                "[127] And surely if the means of judgement within us, supplied by mind and sense, are capable of error, we must admit the logical consequence, that it is God who showers conceptions on the mind and perceptions on sense, and that what comes into being is no gift of any part of ourselves, but all are bestowed by Him, through whom we too have been made."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[128] Having received from their father self-love as their portion, his children desire to add to it and raise it heaven high, until Justice who loves virtue and hates evil comes to the aid. She razes to the ground the cities which they fortified to menace the unhappy soul, and the tower whose name is explained in the book of Judges.",
+                "[129] That name is in the Hebrew tongue Penuel, but in our own “turning from God.” For the stronghold which was built through persuasiveness of argument was built solely for the purpose of diverting and deflecting the mind from honouring God. And what greater sin against justice could there be than this?",
+                "[130] But there stands ready armed for the destruction of this stronghold the robber who despoils injustice and ever breathes slaughter against her, whom the Hebrews call Gideon, which is interpreted the “Robbers’ Hold.” Gideon swore, we read, to the men of Penuel saying, “When I return with peace I will demolish this tower” (Jud. 8:9).",
+                "[131] A grand boast, most fitting to the evil-hating soul whose edge has been made sharp against the impious, that it receives the strength to pull down every argument which would persuade the mind to turn away from holiness. And the words are true to nature, for when the mind “returns,” all in it that was starting aside or turning away is brought to nothing.",
+                "[132] And the fit time for destruction of this, though clean contrary to expectation, is, as Gideon says, not war but peace. For it is through that stability and tranquillity of understanding, which it is the nature of piety to engender, that every argument is overturned which impiety has wrought.",
+                "[133] Many too have exalted their senses, as though they were a tower, so that they touch the boundaries of heaven, that is symbolically our mind, wherein range and dwell those divine forms of being which excel all others. They who do not shrink from this give the preference to sense rather than understanding. They would use perceptible things to subdue and capture the world of things intelligible, thus forcing the two to change places, the one to pass from mastery to slavery, the other from its natural servitude to dominance."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[134] The words, “the Lord came down to see the city and the tower” (Gen. 11:5), must certainly be understood in a figurative sense. For to suppose that the Deity approaches or departs, goes down or goes up, or in general remains stationary or puts Himself in motion, as particular living creatures do, is an impiety which may be said to transcend the bounds of ocean or of the universe itself.",
+                "[135] No, as I have often said elsewhere, the lawgiver is applying human terms to the superhuman God, to help us, his pupils, to learn our lesson. For we all know that when a person comes down he must leave one place and occupy another.",
+                "[136] But God fills all things; He contains but is not contained. To be everywhere and nowhere is His property and His alone. He is nowhere, because He Himself created space and place coincidently with material things, and it is against all right principle to say that the Maker is contained in anything that He has made. He is everywhere, because He has made His powers extend through earth and water, air and heaven, and left no part of the universe without His presence, and uniting all with all has bound them fast with invisible bonds, that they should never be loosed.…",
+                "[137] That aspect of Him which transcends His Potencies cannot be conceived of at all in terms of place, but only as pure being, but that Potency of His by which He made and ordered all things, while it is called God in accordance with the derivation of that name, holds the whole in its embrace and has interfused itself through the parts of the universe.",
+                "[138] But this divine nature which presents itself to us, as visible and comprehensible and everywhere, is in reality invisible, incomprehensible and nowhere.… And so we have the words “Here I stand before thou wast” (Ex. 17:6). “I seem,” He says, “the object of demonstration and comprehension, yet I transcend created things, preceding all demonstration or presentation to the mind.”",
+                "[139] None of the terms, then, which express movement from place to place, whether up or down, to right or to left, forward or backward, are applicable to God in His aspect of pure being. For no such term is compatible with our conception of Him, so that He must also be incapable of displacement or change of locality.",
+                "[140] All the same Moses applies the phrase “came down and saw” to Him, who in His prescience had comprehended all things, not only after but before they came to pass, and he did so to admonish and instruct us, that the absent, who are at a long distance from the facts, should never form conclusions hastily or rely on precarious conjectures, but should come to close quarters with things, inspect them one by one and carefully envisage them. For the certitude of sight must be held as better evidence than the deceitfulness of hearing.",
+                "[141] And therefore among those who live under the best institutions a law has been enacted against giving as evidence what has been merely heard, because hearing’s tribunal has a natural bias towards corrupt judgement. In fact Moses says in his prohibitions, “Thou shalt not accept vain hearing” (Ex. 23:1), by which he does not merely mean that we must not accept a false or foolish story on hearsay, but also that as a means of giving a sure apprehension of the truth, hearing is proved to lag far behind sight and is brimful of vanity."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[142] This is the reason we assign for the words “God came down to see the city and the tower,” but the phrase which follows, “which the sons of men built” (Gen. 11:5), is no idle addition, though perhaps some profane person might say with a sneer, “a novel piece of information this which the lawgiver here imparts to us, namely that it is the sons of men and not some other beings who build cities and towers.” “Who,” he would continue, “even among those who are far gone in insanity, does not know facts so obvious and conspicuous?”",
+                "[143] But you must suppose that it is not this obvious and hackneyed fact which is recorded for us in our most holy oracles, but the hidden truth which can be traced under the surface meaning of the words.",
+                "[144] What then is this truth? Those who ascribe to existing things a multitude of fathers as it were and by introducing their miscellany of deities have flooded everything with ignorance and confusion, or have assigned to pleasure the function of being the aim and end of the soul, have become in very truth builders of the city of our text and of its acropolis. They pile up as in an edifice all that serves to produce that aim or end and thus differ not a whit to my mind from the harlot’s offspring, whom the law has banished from God’s congregation with the words “he that is born of a harlot shall not enter the congregation of the Lord” (Deut. 23:2). For like bowmen, whose shots roam from mark to mark and who never take a skilful aim at any single point, they assume a multitude of what they falsely call sources and causes to account for the origin of the existing world and have no knowledge of the one Maker and Father of all.",
+                "[145] But they who live in the knowledge of the One are rightly called “Sons of God,” as Moses also acknowledges when he says, “Ye are sons of the Lord God” (Deut. 14:1), and “God who begat thee” (<i>ibid</i>. 32:18), and “Is not He Himself thy father?” (<i>ibid</i>. 6). Indeed with those whose soul is thus disposed it follows that they hold moral beauty to be the only good, and this serves as a counterwork engineered by veteran warriors to fight the cause which makes Pleasure the end and to subvert and overthrow it.",
+                "[146] But if there be any as yet unfit to be called a Son of God, let him press to take his place under God’s First-born, the Word, who holds the eldership among the angels, their ruler as it were. And many names are his, for he is called, “the Beginning,” and the Name of God, and His Word, and the Man after His image, and “he that sees,” that is Israel.",
+                "[147] And therefore I was moved a few pages above to praise the virtues of those who say that “We are all sons of one man” (Gen. 42:11). For if we have not yet become fit to be thought sons of God yet we may be sons of His invisible image, the most holy Word. For the Word is the eldest-born image of God.",
+                "[148] And often indeed in the law-book we find another phrase, “sons of Israel,” hearers, that is, sons of him that sees, since hearing stands second in estimation and below sight, and the recipient of teaching is always second to him with whom realities present their forms clear to his vision and not through the medium of instruction.",
+                "[149] I bow, too, in admiration before the mysteries revealed in the books of Kings, where it does not offend us to find described as sons of God’s psalmist David those who lived and flourished many generations afterwards (1 Kings 15:11; 2 Kings 18:3), though in David’s lifetime probably not even their great-grandparents had been born. For the paternity we find ascribed to the standard-bearers of noble living, whom we think of as the fathers who begat us, is the paternity of souls raised to immortality by virtues, not of corruptible bodies."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[150] But of those who glory in their iniquities, the Lord said “behold there is one race and one lip of them all” (Gen. 11:5), that is, behold they are one connexion of family and fellowship of race, and again all have the same harmony and fellowship of voice; there is none whose mind is a stranger to the other nor his voice discordant. It is so also with men who have no gift of music. Sometimes their vocal organ, though every note is entirely tuneless and highly unmelodious, is supremely harmonized to produce disharmony, with a consonance which it turns to mere dissonance.",
+                "[151] And the same studied regularity may be noticed in fever. For the recurrences which are called in the medical schools quotidian, or tertian, or quartan, make their visitation about the same hour of the day or night and maintain their relative order.",
+                "[152] The words “And they have begun to do this” (Gen. 11:6), express strong scorn and indignation. They mean that the miscreants, not content with making havoc of the justice due to their fellows, went further. They dared to attack the rights of heaven, and having sown injustice, they reaped impiety. Yet the wretches had no profit of it.",
+                "[153] For while in wronging each other they achieved much of what they wished and their deeds confirmed what their senseless scheming had devised, it was not so with their impiety. For the things that are God’s cannot be harmed or injured, and when these reprobates turn their transgressions against them, they attain but to the beginning and never arrive at the end.",
+                "[154] Therefore we have these words, “They have <i>begun</i> to do.” For when, insatiate in wrongdoing, they had taken their fill of sins against all that is of earth and sea and air whose allotted nature is to perish, they bethought them to turn their forces against the divine natures in heaven. But on them nothing that exists can usually have any effect save evil speech, though indeed even the foul tongue does not work harm to those who are its objects (for they still possess their nature unchanged), but only brings disasters beyond cure on the revilers.",
+                "[155] Yet that they only began and were unable to reach the end of their impiety is no reason why they should not be denounced as they would had they carried out all their intentions. Therefore he speaks of their having completed the tower, though they had not done so. “The Lord,” he says, “came down to see the city and tower which they had built” already, not which they intended to build (Gen. 11:5)."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[156] What proof then have we that the structure was not already completed? First, self-evident facts. No part of the earth can possibly touch the heaven for the reason already mentioned, namely that it is just as impossible as it is for the centre to touch the circumference. Secondly, because the aether, that holy fire, is an unquenchable flame, as its very name shews, derived as it is from αἴθειν, which is a special term for “burn.”",
+                "[157] This is attested by a single part of the heavenly expanse of fire, namely the Sun, which, in spite of its great distance, sends its rays to the corners of the earth, and both earth and the naturally cold extent of air, which divides it from the sphere of heaven, is warmed or consumed by it as the case may be. For to all that is at a long distance from its course or lies at an angle to it, it merely gives warmth, but all that is near it or directly under it it actually destroys with the force of its flames. If this is so, the men who ventured on the ascent could not fail to be blasted and consumed by the fire, leaving their vaulting ambition unfulfilled.",
+                "[158] That it was unfulfilled seems to be suggested by Moses in the words which follow. “They ceased,” he says, “building the city and the tower” (Gen. 11:8), obviously not because they had finished it, but because they were prevented from completing it by the confusion that fell upon them.",
+                "Yet as the enterprise was not only planned but undertaken, they have not escaped the guilt which would attend its accomplishment."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[159] We have a parallel in Balaam, that dealer in auguries and prodigies and in the vanity of unfounded conjectures, for the name Balaam is by interpretation “vain.” The law-book declares that he cursed the Man of Vision, though in words he uttered prayers of blessing, for it considers not what he actually said, words restamped under God’s providence, like a true coin substituted for the false, but his heart, in which he cherished thoughts of injury rather than of benefit. There is a natural hostility between conjecture and truth, between vanity and knowledge, arid between the divination which has no true inspiration and sound sober wisdom.",
+                "[160] And indeed if a man makes a treacherous attempt against another’s life, but is unable to kill him, he is none the less liable to the penalty of the homicide, as is shewn by the law enacted for such cases. “If,” it runs, “a man attacks his neighbour to kill him by guile and flees to refuge, thou shalt take him from the altar to put him to death” (Ex. 21:14). And yet he merely “attacks” him and has not killed him, but the law regards the purpose of murder as a crime equal to murder itself, and so, even though he takes sanctuary, it does not grant him the privileges of sanctuary, but bids him be taken even from the holy place, because the purpose he has harboured is unholy.",
+                "[161] Its unholiness does not merely consist in this, that it plans death to be dealt by the arm of wickedness against the soul which might live for ever by the acquisition and practice of virtue, but in that it lays its abominable audacity to the charge of God. For the words “flee to refuge” lead us to the reflexion that there are many who, wishing to shirk all charges to which they are liable and claiming to escape the penalties of their misdeeds, ascribe the guilty responsibility, which really belongs to themselves, to God who is the cause of nothing evil, but of all that is good. And therefore it was held no sacrilege to drag such as these from the very altar.",
+                "[162] The punishment which he decrees against those who “build” up and weld together arguments for godlessness is indeed extreme, though perhaps some foolish people will imagine it to be beneficial rather than injurious. “Nothing shall fail from them of all that they attempt to do,” it says (Gen. 11:6). What a misery, transcending limitation and measurement, that everything which the mind in its utter infatuation attempts should be its obedient vassal not backward in any service whether great or small, but hastening as it were to anticipate its every need."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[163] This is a sign of a soul lacking good sense, which finds no obstacle in all that lies between it and its sin. For he who is not far gone in mortal error would pray that all the promptings of his mind’s purposes should fail him, so that when he attempts to commit theft or adultery, or murder or sacrilege, or any similar deed, he should not find an easy path, but rather a host of obstacles to hinder its execution. For if he is prevented, he is rid of that supreme malady, injustice, but if he carries out his purpose in security that malady will be upon him.",
+                "[164] Why then do you continue to envy and admire the fortunes of tyrants, which enable them to achieve with ease all that the madness and brutal savagery of their minds conceive, and hold them blessed, when rather our hearts should bewail them, since poverty and bodily weakness are a positive benefit to the bad, just as abundance of means and strength are most useful to the good?",
+                "[165] One of the foolish who saw to what a pitch of misery free licence to sin leads said boldly, “That I should be let free is the greater indictment” (Gen. 4:13). For it is a terrible thing that the soul, so wild as it is by nature, should be suffered to go unbridled, when even under the rein and with the whip in full play it can hardly be controlled and made docile.",
+                "[166] And therefore the merciful God has delivered an oracle full of loving-kindness which has a message of good hope to the lovers of discipline. It is to this purport. “I will not let thee go nor will I abandon thee” (Josh. 1:5). For when the bonds of the soul which held it fast are loosened, there follows the greatest of disasters, even to be abandoned by God who has encircled all things with the adamantine chains of His potencies and willed that thus bound tight and fast they should never be unloosed.",
+                "[167] Further in another place he says, “All that are bound with a bond are clean” (Num. 19:15), for unbinding is the cause of destruction which is unclean. Never then, when you see any of the wicked accomplishing with ease whatsoever he attempts, admire him for his success, but contrariwise pity him for his ill-luck, for his is a life of continual barrenness in virtue and fruitfulness in vice."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[168] We should give careful consideration to the question of what is implied by the words which are put into the mouth of God. “Come and let us go down and confuse their tongue there” (Gen. 11:7). For it is clear that He is conversing with some persons whom He treats as His fellow-workers, and we find the same in an earlier passage of the formation of man.",
+                "[169] Here we have “The Lord God said ‘let us make man in our own image and likeness’ ” (Gen. 1:26); where the words “let us make” imply plurality. And once more, “God said, ‘behold Adam has become as one of us by knowing good and evil’ ” (Gen. 3:22); here the “us” in “as one of us” is said not of one, but of more than one.",
+                "[170] Now we must first lay down that no existing thing is of equal honour to God and that there is only one sovereign and ruler and king, who alone may direct and dispose of all things. For the lines:",
+                "It is not well that many lords should rule;",
+                "Be there but one, one king,",
+                "could be said with more justice of the world and of God than of cities and men. For being one it must needs have one maker and father and master."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[171] Having reached agreement on this preliminary question our next step will be to gather the relevant considerations into a coherent argument. Let us consider what these are. God is one, but He has around Him numberless Potencies, which all assist and protect created being, and among them are included the powers of chastisement. Now chastisement is not a thing of harm or mischief, but a preventive and correction of sin.",
+                "[172] Through these Potencies the incorporeal and intelligible world was framed, the archetype of this phenomenal world, that being a system of invisible ideal forms, as this is of visible material bodies.",
+                "[173] Now the nature of these two worlds has so struck with awe the minds of some, that they have deified not merely each of them as a whole, but also their fairest parts, the sun, the moon and the whole sky, and have felt no shame in calling them gods. It was the delusion of such persons that Moses saw, when he says “Lord, Lord, King of the Gods” (Deut. 10:17), to shew the difference between the ruler and the subjects.",
+                "[174] There is, too, in the air a sacred company of unbodied souls, commonly called angels in the inspired pages, who wait upon these heavenly powers. So the whole army composed of the several contingents, each marshalled in their proper ranks, have as their business to serve and minister to the word of the Captain who thus marshalled them, and to follow His leadership as right and the law of service demand. For it must not be that God’s soldiers should ever be guilty of desertion from the ranks.",
+                "[175] Now the King may fitly hold converse with his powers and employ them to serve in matters which should not be consummated by God alone. It is true indeed that the Father of All has no need of aught, so that He should require the co-operation of others, if He wills some creative work, yet seeing what was fitting to Himself and the world which was coming into being, He allowed His subject powers to have the fashioning of some things, though He did not give them sovereign and independent knowledge for completion of the task, lest aught of what was coming into being should be miscreated."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[176] This outline was needed as premisses. Now for the inferences. Living nature was primarily divided into two opposite parts, the unreasoning and reasoning, this last again into the mortal and immortal species, the mortal being that of men, the immortal that of unbodied souls which range through the air and sky.",
+                "[177] These are immune from wickedness because their lot from the first has been one of unmixed happiness, and they have not been imprisoned in that dwelling-place of endless calamities—the body. And this immunity is shared by unreasoning natures, because, as they have no gift of understanding, they are also not guilty of wrongdoing willed freely as a result of deliberate reflection.",
+                "[178] Man is practically the only being who having knowledge of good and evil often chooses the worst, and shuns what should be the object of his efforts, and thus he stands apart as convicted of sin deliberate and aforethought.",
+                "[179] Thus it was meet and right that when man was formed, God should assign a share in the work to His lieutenants, as He does with the words “let <i>us</i> make men,” that so man’s right actions might be attributable to God, but his sins to others. For it seemed to be unfitting to God the All-ruler that the road to wickedness within the reasonable soul should be of His making, and therefore He delegated the forming of this part to His inferiors. For the work of forming the voluntary element to balance the involuntary had to be accomplished to render the whole complete."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[180] So much for this point, but it is well to have considered this truth also, that God is the cause of good things only and of nothing at all that is bad, since He Himself was the most ancient of beings and the good in its most perfect form. And it best becomes Him that the work of His hands should be akin to His nature, surpassing in excellence even as He surpasses, but that the chastisement of the wicked should be assured through His underlings.",
+                "[181] My thoughts are attested also by the words of him who was made perfect through practice, “the God who nourisheth me from my youth; the angel who saveth me from all evils” (Gen. 48:15, 16). For he, too, hereby confesses that the truly good gifts, which nourish virtue-loving souls, are referred to God alone as their cause, but on the other hand the province of things evil has been committed to angels (though neither have they full and absolute power of punishment), that nothing which tends to destruction should have its origin in Him whose nature is to save.",
+                "[182] Therefore he says, “Come and let us go down and confound them.” The impious indeed deserve to have it as their punishment, that God’s beneficent and merciful and bountiful powers should be brought into association with works of vengeance. Yet, though knowing that punishment was salutary for the human race, He decreed that it should be exacted by others. It was meet that while mankind was judged to deserve correction, the fountains of God’s ever-flowing gifts of grace should be kept free not only from all that is, but from all that is deemed to be, evil."
+            ],
+            [
+                "[183] We must now inquire what is meant by “confusion.” What should be our method? The following in my opinion. We often obtain a knowledge of persons whom we have not known before from their kinsfolk or those who bear some resemblance to them. And so in the same way things which in themselves are not easy to apprehend may reveal their nature through their likeness to their congeners.",
+                "[184] What things then resemble confusion? “Mechanical mixture,” to use the old philosophical term, and “chemical mixture.” The first presents itself for examination in dry substances, the latter in liquid.",
+                "[185] Mechanical mixture of different bodies occurs when they are juxtaposed in no regular order, as when we collect barley and wheat and pulse or any other kind of grain and pile them together. Chemical mixture is not juxtaposition, but the mutual coextension and complete interpenetration of dissimilar parts, though their various qualities can still be distinguished by artificial means, as is said to be the case with water and wine.",
+                "[186] These substances if united do produce, we are told, a chemical mixture, but all the same that mixture can be resolved into the different qualities out of which it was composed. A sponge dipped in oil will absorb the water and leave the wine. Probably the explanation is that since the sponge is produced out of water, it tends to absorb out of the mixture the substance which is akin to it, the water, and leave the foreign substance, the wine.",
+                "[187] But confusion is the annihilation of the original varieties or qualities, which become coextensive through all the parts and thus produce a single and quite different quality. An example of this is the quadruple drug used in medicine. This is produced, I believe, by the combination of wax, tallow, pitch and resin, but, when the compound has been formed, it is impossible to analyse or separate the properties which went to form it. Each of them has been annihilated, and from this loss of identity in each has sprung another single something with properties peculiar to itself.",
+                "[188] But when God threatens impious thoughts with confusion He does not order merely the annihilation of the specific nature and properties of each separate vice. The order applies also to the aggregate to which they have contributed. He means that neither their separate parts, nor yet their united body and voice, shall be invested with strength to destroy the better element.",
+                "[189] And therefore he says, “Let us confound their tongue there, that each of them may not understand the voice of his neighbour” (Gen. 11:7), and this is equivalent to “let us make each part of vice mute that it may not by its separate utterance nor yet in unison with the others be the cause of mischief.”"
+            ],
+            [
+                "[190] This is our explanation, but those who merely follow the outward and obvious think that we have at this point a reference to the origin of the Greek and barbarian languages. I would not censure such persons, for perhaps the truth is with them also. Still I would exhort them not to halt there, but to press on to allegorical interpretations and to recognize that the letter is to the oracle but as the shadow to the substance and that the higher values therein revealed are what really and truly exist.",
+                "[191] Indeed the lawgiver himself gives openings for this kind of treatment to those whose understanding is not blinded, as he certainly does in the case now under discussion, when he calls what was then taking place a “confusion.”",
+                "Surely if he had merely meant that different languages then originated, he would have applied a more correct term and called it “separation” rather than “confusion.” For when things are divided they are not “confused,” but quite the contrary, “separated.” And the contradiction is not merely one of name but of fact.",
+                "[192] Confusion—the process of fusing together—is, as I have said, the annihilation of the individual properties, and the production thereby of a single whole with its own properties, whereas separation is the division of one into several, as in the case of genus and the species, which form the genus. And therefore if the Sage’s command was to divide speech, the single whole, by section into several languages, he would have used more apposite and exact terms such as dissection or distribution or separation, and not their opposite, confusion.",
+                "[193] But his purpose and desire is to break up the company of vice, to make her agreements of none effect, to do away with her fellowship, to annihilate and destroy her powers, to overthrow the might of her queenship which by her abominable transgressions she had made so strong.",
+                "[194] Observe that he who fashioned the living being, brought none of its parts into fellowship with any other. The eyes cannot hear, nor the ears see; the palatal juices cannot smell, nor the nostrils taste; nor again can speech have any of the sensations which the senses produce, just as on the other hand the senses have no power of utterance.",
+                "[195] For the great Contriver knew that it was well for them that none should hear the voice of his neighbour. He willed rather in the interests of animal life, that each part of the living organism should have the use of its own particular powers without confusion with others, and that fellowship of part with part should be withdrawn from them, while on the other hand the parts of vice should be brought into confusion and complete annihilation, so that neither in unison nor separately by themselves should they become a source of injury to their betters.",
+                "[196] That is why he adds—The Lord dispersed them thence (Gen. 11:8), that is He caused them to be scattered, to be fugitives, to vanish from sight. For while sowing is the cause of good, dispersing or sowing broadcast is the cause of ill. The purpose of the first is to improve, to increase, to create something else; the purpose of the second is to ruin and destroy. But God the Master-planter wills to sow noble living throughout the All, and to disperse and banish from the Commonwealth of the world the impiety which He holds accursed. Thus the evil ways which hate virtue may at last cease to build the city of vice and the tower of godlessness.",
+                "[197] For when these are scattered, those who have been living in exile for many a day under the ban of folly’s tyranny, shall receive their recall under a single proclamation, even the proclamation enacted and ratified by God, as the oracles shew, in which it is declared that “if thy dispersion be from one end of heaven to the other he shall gather thee from thence” (Deut. 30:4).",
+                "[198] Thus it is a work well-befitting to God to bring into full harmony the consonance of the virtues, but to dissipate and destroy the consonance of vices. Yes, confusion is indeed a most proper name for vice, and a standing evidence of this is every fool, whose words and purposes and deeds alike are worthless and unstable."
+            ]
+        ],
+        "Appendix": [
+            "APPENDIX TO DE CONFUSIONE",
+            "§ 5. <i>All of whom are agreed that the earth is the centre of the universe. Cf</i>. Aristot. <i>De Caelo</i>, ii. 13, 293 a τῶν πλείστων ἐπὶ τοῦ μέσου κεῖσθαι (<i>sc</i>. τὴν γῆν) λεγόντων. The contrary opinion, that the centre is fire, was held by the Pythagoreans. <i>Cf</i>. also Diog. Laert. ix. 57.",
+            "§ 24. <i>Creeping and flying … beasts</i>. Evidently these represent the θῦμος and ἐπιθυμία in the whole ψυχή, though Philo does not show which is which, <i>cf</i>. § 21. Judging from that we may suppose that the “flying” are the ἐπιθυμίαι.",
+            "§ 27. <i>Veiled under their name of Sodomite</i>. The phrase κατὰ γλῶτταν does not imply a Hebrew word, for the other two examples in the index (αἵθειν 156 below, Ἄρης from ἀρήγειν, <i>Leg. ad Gaium</i> 112) are both Greek. A γλῶσσα is often an obscure word which requires explanation (hence our <i>glossary</i>). So ἡμεῖς δὲ οὐδὲ ποιητὰς ἐπαινοῦμεν τοὺς κατὰ γλῶσσαν γράφοντας ποιήματα, Lucian, <i>Lexiph</i>. 25. <i>Cf</i>. “lingua secretior, quas Graeci γλῶσσας vocant,” Quintilian, i. 35.",
+            "§ 44. <i>Jer. 15</i>:10. Other MSS. of the LXX have οὐκ ὠφέλησα οὐδὲ ὠφέλησάν με, and so some of the MSS. of Philo. Origen, however, remarks that while most of the copies of the LXX have ὠφέλ-, the best and those most conforming to the Hebrew have ὠφείλ-. Wendland adopted ὠφείλ- on the grounds (1) that the better MSS. of Philo have it, (2) that it is supported by the interpretation given in § 50. This last seems to me very doubtful, and altogether there is little or nothing to choose between the two.",
+            "§ 46. <i>Fullest peace</i>. The epithet ἀπόλεμος is applied to εἰρήνη in <i>De Fug.</i> 174, but in the sense of the true (inward) peace, and in somewhat the same way in <i>De Op.</i> 142. Here it seems pointless, unless we suppose that εἰρήνη conveys to Philo something short of an unbroken peace. The first half of this sentence almost repeats <i>De Gig.</i> 51.",
+            "§ 52. <i>The touch</i>, etc. The sentence as taken in the translation is extremely awkward. Further, the analogy of <i>De Plant.</i> 133, where ἀφή is called ἡ ἀνὰ πᾶν τὸ σῶμα σκιδναμένη δύναμις, suggests that τῶν ἐν τοίς σώμασι δυνάμεων is the faculty of touch. This might be obtained if we omit the second τῶν and transpose κατὰ τὰς προσπιπτούσας to after δυνάμεων, <i>i.e</i>. “about the faculties or sensations residing in our bodies corresponding to the particular substances which come in contact with them.”",
+            "§ 55. τροφόν. This reading, which personifies Midian, fits better with τὸν ἔκγονον αὐτῆς than τροφήν. On the other hand, the latter might be regarded as an allusion to Num. 25:2 “the people ate of their sacrifices,” and Ps. 105(106) 28 καὶ ἐτελέσθησαν τῷ Βεελφεγὼρ καὶ ἔφαγον τὰς θυσίας νεκρῶν. To suppose an allusion to the Psalm will give extra point to νεκρόν. Philo may have understood it to refer to the worshippers instead of to the idols.",
+            "<i>Ibid</i>. ὑμνοῦντα. This alteration of one letter will enable the sentence to be translated without any other change, though it is true that it would be more natural to take ἄφωνον καὶ νεκρόν as predicate after ἀποδεῖξαι rather than, as it is taken in the translation, as a further attribute to χορόν. If ὑπνοῦντα is retained with Wendland (and his suggestion that it is an antithesis to ὁρῶντος has some support from <i>De Mig.</i> 222 τυφλὸν γὰρ ὕπνος), some other alteration is required. Wendland himself suggested γελάσαντες or ἀγαπήσαντα for γελασθέντα. Mangey’s suggestion of τελεσθέντα is very tempting, <i>cf.</i> <i>De Mut.</i> 196. But I see no way of fitting it into the construction. It can hardly be supposed that the idiom of τελεῖσθαι τελετήν can be extended to τελεῖσθαι Μαδιάμ.",
+            "§ 70. <i>Submerged</i>. Or “have taken refuge in.” <i>Cf</i>. the use of ὑπόδρομος <i>Quod Deus</i> 156. Philo reads this sense into the LXX. ἔφυγον ὑπὸ τὸ ὕδωρ, which meant presumably “fled with the water over or threatening them.” E.V. “fled against it.”",
+            "§ 90. <i>The other members of that fraternity and family</i>. This passage follows the Stoic classification. The four passions and the four vices mentioned are those of the Stoics, who added, as secondary to the primary four, incontinence (ἀκρασία), stupidity (βραδύνοια), ill-advisedness (δυσβουλία), Diog. Laert. vii. 93. It is these last three which presumably are meant here.",
+            "§ 99. <i>An appearance of brick</i>. Wendland was inclined to correct εἶδος to ἔργον, in accordance with the quotation of the text above, and εἶδος might well be a slip of the scribe induced by the preceding εἴδει. But on the other hand εἶδος seems to be needed to represent the δοκεῖ of the interpretation. It seems to me safer to regard it as a slip of Philo himself, who for the moment thought that the εἶδος of the quotation went with πλίνθου instead of with στερεώματος.",
+            "§ 103. <i>The asphalt was clay</i>. In the original quotation in § 2 the MSS. shew, as the LXX itself, ἄσφαλτος ἐγένετο ὁ πῆλος. The question naturally arises whether we should emend the text there to bring it into conformity with this, as Wendland suggests (see footnote there). On the whole it seems to me better to leave it and to suppose that Philo here rests his argument on the order of the words. He seems sometimes to attribute an extraordinary value to order, <i>cf.</i> <i>Quod Deus</i> 72 and <i>De Mig.</i> 140.",
+            "§ 106. It is impossible to reproduce in translation the thoughts which the ἀστεῖος of Ex. 2:2 suggests here to Philo. Struck, like the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:23), with the word applied to the infant Moses in the sense of a fine child, on which he also comments in <i>De Congressu</i> 132, he naturally enough connects it with the Stoic use for “virtuous.” But he also remembers its connexion with ἄστυ, and this enables him to identify the ἀστεῖον παιδίον with another ideal of the Stoics, the “world-citizen”; see <i>De Op.</i> 3 and note. The same play on the double meaning of ἀστεῖος appears in § 109 ἀστεῖοι … πολιτεύματι.",
+            "§ 108. θεοῦ δε ὕμνος. In support of the emendation suggested in the footnote, it may be noted that Ps. 45(46) 4 is actually interpreted in a way very similar to what I suggest here in <i>De Som</i>. ii. 246 ff. There we are told that the “city of God” signifies in one sense the world, in another, the soul of the Sage.",
+            "It is no objection, I think, that ἡ τοιάδε naturally, though not necessarily, refers to πολιτεία rather than πόλις. If the city is God’s, its πολιτεία must be God’s also.",
+            "§ 111. ὁ νοῦς. While the use of “the mind” in the sense of an evil mind is quite Philonic, it does not occur elsewhere in this passage, and just above we have ὁ ἄφρων. The very easy correction to ἄνους seems to me therefore very probable.",
+            "§ 115. I have not been able to find elsewhere this argument or statement that the apparent examples of a providential administration of the world are sufficiently explained by τὸ αὐτόματον, and are not frequent enough to amount to even human, much less divine, providence. Philo does not repeat it in the arguments adduced by the inquirer in <i>De Prov.</i> 11. The sections of the <i>De Nat. Deorum</i> in which Cotta discusses “deorumne providentia mundus regatur” are lost.",
+            "§ 124. <i>The causes which come higher</i>, etc. <i>I.e</i>. apparently, mind and sense, which are nearer to the original Cause than the circumstances which we often call “causes.” The word seems to be introduced to interpret the “firstlings” in Abel’s offering. But a more natural sense would be obtained if we suppose that the scribe by a not unnatural slip wrote πρεσβυτέρας for νεωτέρας.",
+            "Philo seems to use αἰτία for secondary causes in preference to αἴτιον. He only uses it of God when contrasting Him with other αἰτίαι.",
+            "§ 137. περιττεύειν, κτλ. For my suggestion of πέρα τοῦ εἶναί που for περιττεύειν οὐ <i>cf</i>. Aristotle, <i>Phys</i>. iv. 1, p. 208 b 29 διὰ τὸ νομίζειν, ὥσπερ οἱ πολλοί, πάντα εἶναί που καὶ ἐν τόπῳ. For πέρα <i>cf</i>. πέρα μνήμης καὶ νοήσεως ἱστάμενον, <i>De Mut.</i> 12.",
+            "<i>Ibid. In accordance with the derivation of that name. I.e</i>. θεός from τίθημι. Philo always uses ἔτυμον and ἐτύμως in this technical way, <i>cf. e.g.</i> <i>De Vita Mos.</i> i. 17 δίδωσιν ὄνομα θεμένη Μωυσῆν ἑτύμως διὰ τὸ ἐκ τοῦ ὕδατος αὐτὸν ἀνελέσθαι· τὸ γὰρ ὕδωρ μῶν ὀνομάζουσι Αἰγύπποι. The one example of those given in the index which at first sight appears to be an exception shews the rule most clearly. In <i>Quod Omn. Prob.</i> 73 we have οἱ ἑτύμως ἑπτὰ σοφοὶ προσονομασθέντες, which we might naturally suppose to mean that they were truly called wise. But examination shews that the allusion is to the supposed derivation of σοφός from σεβασμός, from which also ἑπτά is, according to Philo, derived (<i>De Op.</i> 127).",
+            "§ 141. ἀκοὴν μὴ μαρτυρεῖν. This is the form in which the MSS. give the phrase in a similar passage in <i>De Spec. Leg.</i> iv. 61, and which is regularly used by Demosthenes and Isaeus. Wendland on that passage notes that here ἀκοῇ should be corrected to ἀκοὴν.",
+            "Philo is no doubt alluding to the Attic orators, particularly to Dem. <i>Contra Eubuliden</i> p. 1300 πᾶσι προσήκειν … μηδεμίαν προσάγειν ἀκοὴν πρὸς τὸν τοιοῦτον ἀγῶνα. οὕτω γὰρ τοῦτʼ ἄδικον καὶ σφόδρα πάλαι κέκριται, ὥστʼ οὐδὲ μαρτυρεῖν ἀκοὴν ἐῶσιν οἱ νόμοι, οὐδʼ ἐπὶ τοῖς πάνυ φαύλοις ἐγκλήμασι. So too in ps.-Dem. <i>Contra Steph</i>. ii. p. 1130, <i>Contra Leoch</i>. p. 1027, where exception is made if the person who was heard is dead. See <i>Dict. of Ant</i>. art. “Akoēn Marturein.” In <i>De Spec. Leg.</i> Philo definitely says, what he perhaps implies here, that the Attic legislators took the principle from Moses.",
+            "§ 149. Ryle, <i>Philo and Holy Scripture</i>, p. xxvi, supposes the reference to be to Ezra 8:2. This is quite unnecessary. Ezra is nowhere else quoted by Philo, and Ryle’s idea, that the use of βασιλικαί instead of the usual βασίλειαι points to a different group from the books of Kings, is fanciful.",
+            "§ 151. ἐπὶ τῆς πολίτιδος τὸ κατασκευαστόν. While the general sense of this is clear, the text is very doubtful. κατασκευαστόν (“artificial”) for the regularity which <i>seems</i> artificial is strange but not impossible, and τὸ παραπλήσιον may be used as an adverb. But the word πολῖτις, only known as the feminine of πολίτης, is impossible here, where fever or malaria is clearly meant.",
+            "I suggest very hesitatingly that τῆς πολίτιδος may be a corruption of τῆς σπληνίτιδος. The word σπληνῖτις for a disease of the spleen is not found in the medical writers, but they constantly insist on the enlargement of the spleen as a regular symptom of malaria (see W. H. S. Jones, <i>Malaria</i>, index).",
+            "Wendland would correct to ἐπὶ τῆς πυρετοῦ καταβολῆς τὸ παραπλήσιον, which bears little resemblance to the text.",
+            "Mangey thought that the whole passage was an irrelevant interpolation. On the contrary, as an illustration of Philo’s point, that we find harmony and regularity in things evil, it seems very appropriate.",
+            "<i>Ibid</i>. εἰς αὐτά. The phrase is, as it stands, unintelligible. I suggest and have translated εἰς αὑτὰς or εἰς αὑτὰς αὐτήν (with regard to themselves, <i>i.e</i>. each other). I understand Philo to mean that while the attacks recur at the same hour, they vary somewhat in nature, but the varieties also have a regular order. Whether this is medically untrue, or whether if it is, Philo is likely to have thought it true, I do not know. Wendland suggested αὐτὴν αἰεί. Mangey read εἰς τὰ αὐτά. I think ἰσότητα might be worth considering.",
+            "§ 154. ἅς τι τῶν ὄντων. This seems to me less unsatisfactory than Wendland’s reading. But τι = ὁτιοῦν in this position is strange. Possibly οὔ τι (adverbial). Also ἔθος, for which Wendland would substitute θέμις, is odd. Altogether the text is unsatisfactory.",
+            "§ 164. <i>The fortunes of tyrants</i>. Philo doubtless has in mind the description of the miserable condition of tyrants in <i>Republic</i>, Bk. ix., particularly 576 B.",
+            "§ 165. <i>Free licence to sin</i>. This use of ἐκεχειρία (<i>cf</i>. τὴν ἐς τὸ ἁμαρτάνειν ἐκεχειρίαν, <i>De Jos.</i> 254) seems peculiar to Philo. It suggests that when it occurs without such explanatory phrases, as in <i>De Cher.</i> 92 and <i>De Sac.</i> 23, the meaning is rather licence in general, than, as it was translated there, “freedom from stress of business.”",
+            "§ 173. <i>Each of them as a whole</i>. Did anyone deify the νοητὸς κόσμος? Philo perhaps means that the deification of the visible world <i>ipso facto</i> involved that of the invisible.",
+            "§ 174. ἐκάστων. I retain this, supposing that the army of the subordinates are regarded as formed of three kinds, (1) the Potencies who as agents in the creation of the two worlds stand above the rest, (2) the divine natures in heaven, <i>i.e</i>. the heavenly bodies, (3) the “souls” or angels in the lower air.",
+            "§§ 184–187. The sense of these sections is given also by Stobaeus, as from Chrysippus (<i>S.V.F.</i> ii. 471), with the same illustrations from the wine and water and oiled sponge, and much the same language throughout. There is, however, a complete difference in his use of the term μῖξις, which he distinguishes from παράθεσις and applies to the ἀντιπαρέκτασις διʼ ὅλων in dry substances while κρᾶσις is reserved for the same in liquids. His example of μῖξις is the mixture of fire and iron in heated iron. It does not follow that Philo made a mistake; the use of terms seems to have varied. <i>Cf</i>. <i>ibid</i>. 473.",
+            "§ 186. <i>Resolved</i>. Or “expanded.” Some MSS. ἀναπληροῦσθαι. See on the word Liddell &amp; Scott (1927). The suggestion there that the word suggests “resolving into <i>simple</i> elements” is unnecessary.",
+            "§ 187. <i>Confusion is the annihilation. Cf</i>. <i>S. V.F</i>. 473 (also from Chrysippus) τὰς δέ τινας (<i>sc</i>. μίξεις γίνεσθαι) συγχύσει, διʼ ὅλων τῶν τε οὐσιῶν αὐτῶν καὶ τῶν ἑν αὐταῖς ποιοτήτων συμφθειρομένων ἀλλήλαις, ὡς γίνεσθαί φησιν ἐπὶ τῶν ἰατρικῶν φαρμάκων, κατὰ σύμφθαρσιν τῶν μιγνυμένων ἄλλου τινὸς ἐξ αὐτῶν γεννωμένου σώματος.",
+            "§ 198. Heinemann in a note added to Stein’s translation considers that πεφορημένος is unsuitable here and suggests πεφυρημένος. But this comes from φυράω, which will not give any suitable meaning, and the word of which he is thinking is no doubt πεφυρμένος, from φύρω, which is certainly often combined with συγχέω, <i>cf</i>. particularly <i>Spec. Leg.</i> iv. 77 διαιρείτω καὶ διακρινέτω τὰς φύσεις τῶν πραγμάτων ἵνα μὴ ��ύρηται συγχεόμενα τοῖς παρασήμοις τὰ δόκιμα. However, the explanation of πεφορημένος given in the footnote seems to me satisfactory, <i>cf</i>. the combination of πεφορημένος with ἄσωτος to indicate the profligate in <i>De Fug.</i> 28, and πάντῃ φορούμενος associated with σπείρεται in the sense of διασπείρεται in <i>De Cong.</i> 58."
+        ]
+    },
+    "versions": [
+        [
+            "Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1932",
+            "https://www.nli.org.il/en/books/NNL_ALEPH001216057/NLI"
+        ]
+    ],
+    "heTitle": "על בלילת הלשונות",
+    "categories": [
+        "Second Temple",
+        "Philo"
+    ],
+    "schema": {
+        "heTitle": "על בלילת הלשונות",
+        "enTitle": "On the Confusion of Tongues",
+        "key": "On the Confusion of Tongues",
+        "nodes": [
+            {
+                "heTitle": "הקדמה",
+                "enTitle": "Introduction"
+            },
+            {
+                "heTitle": "",
+                "enTitle": ""
+            },
+            {
+                "heTitle": "הערות",
+                "enTitle": "Appendix"
+            }
+        ]
+    }
+}
\ No newline at end of file