על שהאל הוא ללא שינוי ו׳On the Unchangeableness of God 6
א׳
1[23] It is a tenet of the lawgiver also that the perfect man seeks for quietude. For the words addressed to the Sage with God as the speaker, “stand thou here with Me” (Deut. 5:31), shew most plainly how unbending, unwavering and broad-based is his will.
ב׳
2[24] Wonderful indeed is the soul of the Sage, how he sets it, like a lyre, to harmony not with a scale of notes low and high, but with the knowledge of moral opposites, and the practice of such of them as are better; how he does not strain it to excessive heights, nor yet relax it and weaken the concord of virtues and things naturally beautiful, but keeps it ever at an equal tension and plays it with hand or bow in melody.
ג׳
3[25] Such a soul is the most perfect instrument fashioned by nature, the pattern of those which are the work of our hands. And if it be well adjusted, it will produce a symphony the most beautiful in the world, one which has its consummation not in the cadences and tones of melodious sound, but in the consistencies of our life’s actions.
ד׳
4[26] Oh! if the soul of man, when it feels the soft breeze of wisdom and knowledge, can dismiss the stormy surge which the fierce burst of the gale of wickedness has suddenly stirred, and levelling the billowy swell can rest in unruffled calm under a bright clear sky, can you doubt that He, the Imperishable Blessed One, who has taken as His own the sovereignty of the virtues, of perfection itself and beatitude, knows no change of will, but ever holds fast to what He purposed from the first without any alteration?
ה׳
5[27] With men then it must needs be that they are ready to change, through instability whether it be in themselves or outside them. So for example often when we have chosen our friends and been familiar with them for a short time, we turn from them, though we have no charge to bring against them, and count them amongst our enemies, or at best as strangers.
ו׳
6[28] Such action proves the facile levity of ourselves, how little capacity we have for stoutly holding to our original judgements. But God has no such fickleness. Or again, sometimes we are minded to hold to the standards we have taken but we find ourselves with others who have not remained constant, and thus our judgements perforce change with theirs.
ז׳
7[29] For a mere man cannot foresee the course of future events, or the judgements of others, but to God as in pure sunlight all things are manifest. For already He has pierced into the recesses of our soul, and what is invisible to others is clear as daylight to His eyes. He employs the forethought and foreknowledge which are virtues peculiarly His own, and suffers nothing to escape His control or pass outside His comprehension. For not even about the future can uncertainty be found with Him, since nothing is uncertain or future to God.
ח׳
8[30] No one doubts that the parent must have knowledge of his offspring, the craftsman of his handiwork, the steward of things entrusted to his stewardship. But God is in very truth the father and craftsman and steward of the heaven and the universe and all that is therein. Future events lie shrouded in the darkness of the time that is yet to be at different distances, some near, some far.
ט׳
9[31] But God is the maker of time also, for He is the father of time’s father, that is of the universe, and has caused the movements of the one to be the source of the generation of the other. Thus time stands to God in the relation of a grandson. For this universe, since we perceive it by our senses, is the younger son of God. To the elder son, I mean the intelligible universe, He assigned the place of firstborn, and purposed that it should remain in His own keeping.
י׳
10[32] So this younger son, the world of our senses, when set in motion, brought that entity we call time to the brightness of its rising. And thus with God there is no future, since He has made the boundaries of the ages subject to Himself. For God’s life is not a time, but eternity, which is the archetype and pattern of time; and in eternity there is no past nor future, but only present existence.