על צאצאי קין מ״וOn the Posterity of Cain and his Exile 46
א׳
1[158] This is the food of the soul of an earnest striver, to deem labour not bitter but most sweet. Not for all is it lawful to partake of this food. Those only may do so in whose case the golden calf, the idol of the Egyptians, which is the body, is strewn upon the water, after having been burnt and ground. For it is said in the sacred books that “Moses took the calf and burned it up with fire and ground it fine and sowed it upon the water, and gave the Children of Israel to drink of it”
ב׳
2[159] (Exod. 32:20). For the lover of virtue, set on fire by the brilliant appearance of the beautiful, burns up the pleasures of the body, and then chops and grinds them up, employing the principle of classification, and by this means teaches that health, or beauty, or precision of the senses, or complete soundness, including strength and muscular force, are among the bodily “good things,” and yet all these are shared with others by men abominable and accursed; whereas, had they been good things, no bad man would have had part in any of them.
ג׳
3[160] But these men, even if utterly worthless, still, being human beings and of the same nature, have their share of these things in partnership with good men. As it is, moreover, even the most savage of wild beasts enjoy the advantage of these “good things,” if good things they really are, in greater measure than those who are endowed with reason.
ד׳
4[161] For what athlete would be a match for the power of a bull or the strength of an elephant? What runner could equal the swiftness of a hound or a hare? The man of keenest eyesight is very shortsighted in comparison with the power of vision possessed by hawks or eagles. In hearing and scent the irrational creatures are greatly superior to us, for even an ass, regarded as the dullest among living creatures, were he to be tested with us, would make our hearing appear deafness; while a dog with his great rapidity of scent, reaching as it does to such an enormous distance as to rival the range of the eyes, would prove a nose to be a superfluous part of the human frame.