Again observe that he does not say that they came to the plain in which they stayed, but that only after full search and exploration they found 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.’ ” 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). 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. 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.
On the Confusion of Tongues 17
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.