על הכרובים כ״בOn the Cherubim 22
א׳
1[71] But, if you reform and obtain a portion of the wisdom that you need, you will say that all are God’s possessions and not yours, your reflections, your knowledge of every kind, your arts, your conclusions, your reasonings on particular questions, your sense-perceptions, in fact the activities of your soul, whether carried on through the senses or without them. But if you leave yourself for ever unschooled and untaught, you will be eternally enslaved to hard mistresses, vain fancies, lusts, pleasures, promptings to wrongdoing, follies, false opinions.
ב׳
2[72] For if, says Moses, the servant should answer and say “I have come to love my master, my wife and my children, I will not go out free,” he shall be brought to the tribunal of God, and with God as judge shall have his request ratified, having first had his ear bored with an awl (Exod. 21:5, 6), that he may not receive the divine message of the freedom of the soul.
ג׳
3[73] For lofty words like these of having come to love the mind and thinking it his master and benefactor are worthy of a reasoning disqualified and rejected as it were from the sacred arena, a slave in very truth and wholly childish. And so too when he speaks of his exceeding affection for outward sense and his belief that she is his own possession and the greatest of blessings. So too with the children of these two, the children of mind—reflection, reasoning, judging, deliberating, conjecturing—the children of sense—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, in fact sense-perception in general.
