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?” 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. 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. 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” ( ibid . 32:18), and “Is not He Himself thy father?” ( ibid . 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
On the Confusion of Tongues 28
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.