Man and the World
For it cannot be that while in yourself there is a mind appointed as your ruler which all the community of the body obeys and each of the senses follows, the world, the fairest, and greatest and most perfect work of all, of which everything else is a part, is without a king who holds it together and directs it with justice. That the king is invisible need not cause you to wonder, for neither is the mind in your self visible. Anyone who reflects on these things and learns from no distant source, but from one near at hand, namely himself and what makes him what he is, will know for certain that the world is not the primal God but a work of the primal God and Father of all Who, though invisible, yet brings all things to light, revealing the natures of great and small. For He did not deem it right to be apprehended by the eyes of the body, perhaps because it was contrary to holiness that the mortal should touch the eternal,
He Alone is a True Man Who Hopes
Moses called the first lover of hope “Man,” thus bestowing on him as a special favour the name which is common to the race (for the Chaldeana name for Man is Enos), on the grounds that he alone is a true man who expects good things and rests firmly on comfortable hopes. He regards a despondent person as no man but a beast in human shape, since he has been robbed of the nearest and dearest possession of the human soul, namely hope.
Holy and praiseworthy are the hopeful man, just as on the contrary the despondent is unholy and blameworthy, since in all things he takes fear for his evil counsellor.
Noah as a Type of Christ
When all these evils, so many and so vast, had burst upon the world… one house alone, that of the man called just and dear to God, was preserved. Thus he received two gifts of the highest kind—one that he did not perish with the rest, the other that he should be in his turn the founder of a new race of men. For God deemed him worthy to be both the last and the first of our kind—last of those who lived before the flood and first of those who lived after it.
God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
All alike are God- lovers and God-beloved, and their affection for the true God was returned by Him, Who deigned, as His utterances shew, in recognition of their high and life-long virtues to make them partners in the title which He took, for He united them by joining His special name to theirs and calling Himself by one combined of the three. “For this,” He said, “is my eternal name — the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob,” relative instead of absolute, and surely that is natural.
God indeed needs no name; yet, though He needed it not, He nevertheless vouchsafed to give to humankind a name of Himself suited to them, that so men might be able to take refuge in prayers and supplications and not be deprived of comforting hopes.
Thus the eternal name revealed in his words is meant to in dicate the three said values rather than actual men. For the nature of man is perishable, but that of virtue is imperishable. And it is more reasonable that what is eternal should be predicated of the imperishable than of the mortal, since imperishableness is akin to eternality, while death is at enmity with it.
Trinity
The central place is held by the Father of the Universe, Who in the sacred scriptures is called He that is as His proper name, while on either side of Him are the senior potencies, the nearest to Him , the creative and the kingly. The title of the former is God, since it made and ordered the All; the title of the latter is Lord, since it is the fundamental right of the maker to rule and control what he has brought into being. So the central Being with each of His potencies as His squire presents to the mind which has vision the appearance sometimes of one, sometimes of three: of one, when that mind is highly purified and, passing beyond not merely the multiplicity of other numbers, but even the dyad which is next to the unit, presses on to the ideal form which is free from mixture and complexity, and being self-contained needs nothing more; of three, when, as yet uninitiated into the highest mysteries, it is still a votary only of the minor rites and unable to apprehend the Existent alone by Itself and apart from all else, but only through its actions, as either creative or ruling. This is, as they say, a “second best voyage”; yet all the same there is in it an element of a way of thinking such as God approves. But the former state of mind has not merely an element. It is the truth, higher than a way of thinking, more precious than anything which is merely thought.
Isaac: The Gift of Joy
The proposed victim is called in Chaldaean Isaac, but, if the word is translated into our language, Laughter. But the laughter here understood is not the laughter which amuse ment arouses in the body, but the good emotion of the understanding, that is joy. This the Sage is said to sacrifice as his duty to God, thus showing in a figure that rejoicing is most closely associated with God alone. For mankind is subject to grief and very fearful of evils either present or expected, so that men are either distressed by disagreeables close at hand or are agitated by troublous fear of those which are still to come. But the nature of God is without grief or fear and wholly exempt from passion of any kind, and alone partakes of perfect happiness and bliss. The frame of mind which has made this true acknowledgement God, Who has banished jealousy from His presence in His kindness and love for mankind, fitly rewards by returning the gift in so far as the recipient’s capacity allows.