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. 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. “And the asphalt was clay to them” ( ibid .). 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. 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. 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. 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.
On the Confusion of Tongues 22
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.