על בריאת העולם כ״דOn the Account of the World's Creation 24
א׳
1[72] One may not unfitly raise the question what reason there could be for his ascribing the creation in the case of man only not to one Creator as in the case of the rest but, as the words would suggest, to several. For he represents the Father of the universe as speaking thus, “Let us make man after our image and likeness.” ‘Can it be,’ I would ask, ‘that He to whom all things are subject, is in need of anyone whatever? Or can it be that when He made the heaven and the earth and the seas, he required no one to be his fellow-worker, yet was unable apart from the co-operation of others by His own unaided power to fashion a creature so puny and perishable as man?’ The full truth about the cause of this it must needs be that God alone knows, but the cause which by probable conjecture seems plausible and reasonable we must not conceal.
ב׳
2[73] It is this. Among existences some partake neither of virtue nor of vice, like plants and animals devoid of reason; the one sort because they are without animal life and furnished with a nature incapable of consciously receiving impressions; the other sort because from them mind and reason have been eliminated: for mind and reason are as it were the dwelling-place of vice and virtue, which are by nature constituted to make their abode in them. Others again have partnership with virtue only, and have no part or lot in vice. Such are the heavenly bodies; for these are said to be not only living creatures but living creatures endowed with mind, or rather each of them a mind in itself, excellent through and through and unsusceptible of any evil. Others are of mixed nature, as man, who is liable to contraries, wisdom and folly, self-mastery and licentiousness, courage and cowardice, justice and injustice, and (in a word) to things good and evil, fair and foul, to virtue and vice.
ג׳
3[74] Now it was most proper to God the universal Father to make those excellent things by Himself alone, because of their kinship to Him. To make those which are neither good nor bad was not alien to Him, since those too are free from vice which is hateful to Him. To make those of mixed nature was in one respect proper to Him, in another not so; proper, so far as the better principle which forms an ingredient in them is concerned, alien, in virtue of the contrary and worse principle.
ד׳
4[75] So we see why it is only in the instance of man’s creation that we are told by Moses that God said “Let us make,” an expression which plainly shows the taking with Him of others as fellow-workers. It is to the end that, when man orders his course aright, when his thoughts and deeds are blameless, God the universal Ruler may be owned as their Source; while others from the number of His subordinates are held responsible for thoughts and deeds of a contrary sort: for it could not be that the Father should be the cause of an evil thing to His offspring: and vice and vicious activities are an evil thing.
ה׳
5[76] And when Moses had called the genus “man,” quite admirably did he distinguish its species, adding that it had been created “male and female,” and this though its individual members had not yet taken shape. For the primary species are in the genus to begin with, and reveal themselves as in a mirror to those who have the faculty of keen vision.