On Sobriety 10

¹These remarks have been made solely for the purpose of shewing that Ham the son of Noah is a name for vice in the quiescent state and the grandson Canaan for the same when it passes into active movement. For Ham is by interpretation “heat,” and Canaan “tossing.” ²Now heat is a sign of fever in the body and of vice in the soul. For just as an attack of fever is a disease not of a part but of the whole body, so vice is a malady of the whole soul. Sometimes it is in a state of quiescence, sometimes of motion, and its motion is called by Moses “tossing,” which in the Hebrew tongue is Canaan. ³Now no legislator fixes a penalty against the unjust when in the quiescent state, but only when they are moved to action and commit the deeds to which injustice prompts them, just as in the case of animals that bite, unless they are going to bite, no wish to kill them would be felt by any right-minded person; for we must leave out of consideration the savagery which has a natural craving for indiscriminate slaughter. ⁴It is natural enough, then, that the just man should appear to lay his curses on the grandson Canaan. I say “appear,” because virtually he does curse his son Ham in cursing Canaan, since when Ham has been moved to sin, he himself becomes Canaan, for it is a single subject, wickedness, which is presented in two different aspects, rest and motion. But rest takes precedence in point of age to motion, and thus the moving stands to the stationary in the relation of child to parent. ⁵Thus it agrees with the verities of nature when Canaan or tossing is described as the son of Ham or quiescence, and this serves to shew the truth of what is said elsewhere, “visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” (Exod. 20:5). For it is upon the effects of our reasonings, what we may call their descendants, that punishments fall, while those reasonings taken by themselves go scot-free from arraignment, if no culpable action supervene. ⁶And therefore, too, in the law of leprosy Moses with his never-failing greatness lays down that the movement and wider extension and diffusion of the disease is unclean, but the quiescence is clean. For he says, “if it spread abroad in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him unclean. But if the bright spot stay in one place and be not spread abroad, he shall pronounce him clean” (Lev. 13:22, 23). Thus the state of repose, because it is a standing-still of the vices and passions in the soul (and it is these which are figured by leprosy), is exempt from indictment, while the state of motion and progression is rightly held liable to arraignment. ⁷And a similar lesson is contained in a more striking form in the oracles in Genesis. For God says to the wicked one, “man, thou hast sinned, be still” (Gen. 4:7). This implies that while sin, inasmuch as it is movement and activity with vice as its motive, is liable to punishment, stillness, because it is stationary and quiescent, is exempt from arraignment and a means of safety.