על בריאת העולם מ״חOn the Account of the World's Creation 48
א׳
1[139] That in soul also he was most excellent is manifest; for the Creator, we know, employed for its making no pattern taken from among created things, but solely, as I have said, His own Word (or Reason). It is on this account that he says that man was made a likeness and imitation of the Word, when the Divine Breath was breathed into his face. The face is the seat of the senses. By the senses the Creator endowed the body with soul. To the senses, when He had installed the sovereign Reason in the princely part of man’s being, He delivered it to be by them escorted to the apprehension of colours and sounds, as well as of flavours and scents and the like. The Reason, apart from perception by the senses, was unable by itself alone to apprehend these. Now the copy of a perfectly beautiful pattern must needs be of perfect beauty. But the Word of God surpasses beauty itself, beauty, that is, as it exists in Nature. He is not only adorned with beauty, but is Himself in very truth beauty’s fairest adornment.