על שינוי השמות ל״בOn the Change of Names 32
א׳
1[172] With such hopes the pleasure-loving mind is not content merely to angle with the baits of every lust for the younger sort, the novices in the training-schools of temperance, but revolts from the idea that it should be unable to subjugate the older thinking, in which the frenzy of passion has passed its prime.
ב׳
2[173] He makes other offers, offers which mean loss though he speaks of them as profit. “Take your father and your wealth,” he says, “and come to me” (ibid. 18) into Egypt, come, that is, to this King of terror, who when our paternal and our truly real wealth had in virtue of its natural liberty left the body behind in its advance, draws it back and throws it with violence into a prison of exceeding bitterness; and over this prison he sets for keeper, as the oracular text tells us, Potiphar (Gen. 39:1) the eunuch and chief cook : eunuch, because he has scant store of excellence and has lost by mutilation the soul’s organs of generation, unable further to sow and beget anything that tends to discipline; cook, because in cook-like fashion he slaughters living beings, chops and divides them, piece by piece, limb by limb, and moves in a chaos of lifeless carcasses, immaterial rather than material; and with his elaborately seasoned dishes arouses and excites the appetites of fruitless passions, appetites which should rather be tamed and calmed.
ג׳
3[174] And also, says the Pleasure-lover, “I will give you of all the good things of Egypt, and ye shall eat the marrow of the land” (Gen. 45:18). But we will answer him, “We do not accept the body’s good, for we have seen the things of the soul. For so deeply has our strong yearning for these sunk into us that it can make us forget all that is dear to the flesh.”