על השיכרות כ״הOn Drunkenness 25
א׳
1[97] Our being is sometimes at rest, at other times is subject to impulses or, as we may call them, ill-timed outcries. When these are still we have profound peace, when it is otherwise we have relentless wars.
ב׳
2[98] To this there can be no testimony so certain as that of personal experience. Such a person hears the voice of the people shouting and says to the one who watches and observes the course of events, “There is a voice of war in the camp.” For so long as the unreasoning impulses did not stir and “shout” within us, the mind stood firm and stedfast. But when they begin to fill the region of the soul with manifold sounds and voices, when they summon the passions and rouse them to action, they create the discord of civil war.
ג׳
3[99] “The war is in the camp.” True indeed. For where else do we find contentions, combats, hostilities and all the works that go with bitter and persistent war, but in the life of the body which in his parable he calls the camp? That camp the mind is wont to leave, when, filled with the divine, it finds itself in the presence of the Existent Himself and contemplates the incorporeal ideas.
ד׳
4[100] For “Moses,” we read, “took his tent and pitched it outside the camp,” not near, but very far, “at a distance from the camp” (Exod. 33:7). Under this figure he suggests that the Sage is a pilgrim who travels from peace to war, and from the camp of mortality and confusion to the divine life of peace where strife is not, the life of reasonable and happy souls.
