על חיי העיון א׳On the Contemplative Life or Suppliants 1
א׳
1[1] I have discussed the Essenes, who persistently pursued the active life and excelled in all or, to put it more moderately, in most of its departments. I will now proceed at once in accordance with the sequence required by the subject to say what is needed about those who embraced the life of contemplation. In doing so I will not add anything of my own procuring to improve upon the facts as is constantly done by poets and historians through lack of excellence in the lives and practices which they record, but shall adhere absolutely to the actual truth. Though I know that in this case it is such as to unnerve the greatest master of oratory, still we must persevere and not decline the conflict, for the magnitude of virtue shown by these men must not be allowed to tie the tongues of those who hold that nothing excellent should be passed over in silence.
ב׳
2[2] The vocation of these philosophers is at once made clear from their title of Therapeutae and Therapeutrides, a name derived from θεραπεύω, either in the sense of “cure” because they profess an art of healing better than that current in the cities which cures only the bodies, while theirs treats also souls oppressed with grievous and well-nigh incurable diseases, inflicted by pleasures and desires and griefs and fears, by acts of covetousness, folly and injustice and the countless host of the other passions and vices: or else in the sense of “worship,” because nature and the sacred laws have schooled them to worship the Self-existent who is better than the good, purer than the One and more primordial than the Monad.
ג׳
3[3] Who among those who profess piety deserve to be compared with these?
ד׳
4Can we compare those who revere the elements, earth, water, air, fire, which have received different names from different peoples who call fire Hephaestus because it is kindled (ἐξάπτω), air Hera because it is lifted up (αἴρω) and exalted on high, water Poseidon perhaps because it is drunk (ποτός), and earth Demeter because it appears to be the mother of all plants and animals?
ה׳
5[4] Sophists have invented these names for the elements but the elements themselves are lifeless matter incapable of movement of itself and laid by the Artificer as a substratum for every kind of shape and quality.
ו׳
6[5] What of the worshippers of the bodies framed from the elements, sun, moon or the other stars fixed or wandering, or the whole heaven and universe? But these too were not brought into being self-made, but through an architect of most perfect knowledge.
ז׳
7[6] What of the worship of the demi-gods? Surely this is quite ridiculous. How could one and the same person be both mortal and immortal, to say nothing of the reproach attaching to the original source of their birth, tainted as it is with the licentiousness of wanton youth which they impiously dare to ascribe to the blissful and divine powers by supposing that the thrice blessed and exempt from every passion in their infatuation had intercourse with mortal women.
ח׳
8[7] What of the worshippers of the different kinds of images? Their substance is wood and stone, till a short time ago completely shapeless, hewn away from their congenital structure by quarrymen and woodcutters while their brethren, pieces from the same original source, have become urns and foot-basins or some others of the less honourable vessels which serve the purposes of darkness rather than of light.
ט׳
9[8] For as for the gods of the Egyptians it is hardly decent even to mention them. The Egyptians have promoted to divine honours irrational animals, not only of the tame sort but also beasts of the utmost savagery, drawn from each of the kinds found below the moon, from the creatures of the land the lion, from those of the water their indigenous crocodile, from the rangers of the air the hawk and the Egyptian ibis.
י׳
10[9] And though they see these creatures brought to their birth, requiring food, eating voraciously, full of ordure, venomous too and man-eating, the prey of every sort of disease, and perishing not only by a natural but often by a violent death, they render worship to them, they the civilized to the uncivilized and untamed, the reasonable to the irrational, the kinsfolk of the Godhead to ugliness unmatched even by a Thersites, the rulers and masters to the naturally subservient and slavish.