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. 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. 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.… 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. 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.” 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. 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. 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.
On the Confusion of Tongues 27
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.