על עשרת הדברות י״גOn the Decalogue 13
א׳
1[59] But there are some whose views are affected with such folly that they not only regard the said objects as gods but each of them severally as the greatest and primal God. Incapacity for instruction or indifference to learning prevents them from knowing the truly Existent because they suppose that there is no invisible and conceptual cause outside what the senses perceive, though the clearest possible proof lies ready at their hand.
ב׳
2[60] For while it is with the soul that they live and plan and carry out all the affairs of human life, they can never see the soul with the eyes of the body, though every feeling of ambition might well have been aroused in the hope of seeing that most august of all sacred objects, the natural stepping-stone to the conception of the Uncreated and Eternal, the invisible Charioteer who guides in safety the whole universe.
ג׳
3[61] So just as anyone who rendered to the subordinate satraps the honours due to the Great King would have seemed to reach the height not only of unwisdom but of foolhardiness, by bestowing on servants what belonged to their master, in the same way anyone who pays the same tribute to the creatures as to their Maker may be assured that he is the most senseless and unjust of men in that he gives equal measure to those who are not equal, though he does not thereby honour the meaner many but deposes the one superior.
ד׳
4[62] And there are some who in a further excess of impiety do not even give this equal payment, but bestow on those others all that can tend to honour, while to Him they refuse even the commonest of all tributes, that of remembering Him. Whom duty bids them remember, if nothing more, Him they forget, a forgetfulness deliberately practised to their lasting misery.
ה׳
5[63] Some again, seized with a loud-mouthed frenzy, publish abroad samples of their deep-seated impiety and attempt to blaspheme the Godhead, and when they whet the edge of their evil-speaking tongue they do so in the wish to grieve the pious who feel at once the inroad of a sorrow indescribable and inconsolable, which passing through the ears wastes as with fire the whole soul. For this is the battery of the unholy, and is in itself enough to curb the mouths of the devout who hold that silence is best for the time being to avoid giving provocation.