על בריאת העולם כ״וOn the Account of the World's Creation 26
א׳
1[79] Such is the first reason for which apparently man was created after all things: but we must mention a second that is not improbable. Directly he came into existence man found there all provisions for life. This was for the instruction of future generations. Nature seemed almost to cry aloud in so many words that like the first father of the race they were to spend their days without toil or trouble surrounded by lavish abundance of all that they needed. And this will be so if irrational pleasures do not get control of the soul, making their assaults upon it through greediness and lust, nor the desires for glory or wealth or power arrogate to themselves the control of the life, nor sorrows lower and depress the mind;
ב׳
2[80] and if fear, that evil counsellor, do not dispel high impulses to noble deeds, nor folly and cowardice and injustice and the countless host of other vices assail him. For in sooth as things now are, when all these evils which have been recounted have won the day, and men have flung themselves unrestrainedly into the indulgence of their passions and left uncontrolled their guilty cravings, cravings which it were sinful even to name, a fitting penalty is incurred, due punishment of impious courses. That penalty is difficulty in obtaining the necessaries of life. For men plough the prairie and irrigate it from spring and river; they sow and plant; and through the livelong year unweariedly take up by day and night the ever renewed toil of the tiller of the earth; and yet they are hard put to it to gather in their requisite supplies, and these at times of poor quality and barely sufficient, having suffered injury from many causes: either they were ravaged by recurring rainfalls, or beaten down in masses by the weight of hail that fell on them, or half frozen by snow, or torn up roots and all by violent winds; for water and air can in many ways change the fruitfulness of crops into barrenness.
ג׳
3[81] But if the unmeasured impulses of men’s passions were calmed and allayed by self-mastery, and their earnestness and eager striving after the infliction of wrongs were checked by righteousness; if, in a word, the vices and the fruitless practices to which they prompt were to give place to the virtues and their corresponding activities, the warfare in the soul, of all wars veritably the most dire and most grievous, would have been abolished, and peace would prevail and would in quiet and gentle ways provide good order for the exercise of our faculties, and there would be hope that God, being the Lover of virtue and the Lover of what is good and beautiful and also the Lover of man, would provide for our race good things all coming forth spontaneously and all in readiness. For it is clear that it is easier without calling in the husbandman’s art to supply in abundance the yield of growths already existing than to bring into being things that were non-existent.