מי יורש קנייני אלוה ל״חWho is the Heir of Divine Things 38
א׳
1[182] Marvellous too is the equal distribution of the sacrificial blood which the high priest Moses, following Nature’s guidance, made. He took, we read, the half of the blood and poured it into mixing-bowls and the half he poured upon the altar (Ex. 24:6), to shew us that sacred wisdom is of a twofold kind, divine and human.
ב׳
2[183] The divine kind is without mixture or infusion and therefore is poured as an offering to God, who knows no mixture or infusion and is in His isolation a unity. But the human is mixed with infusion and thus is scattered abroad upon us, who are a mixed compounded product of infusion, to create in us oneness of mind and fellowship, and in fact a “mixing” of our various parts and ways of conduct. But the part of the soul which is free from mixture and infusion is the mind in its perfect purity.
ג׳
3[184] This mind filled with the breath of inspiration from heaven above is guarded from malady and injury, and then reduced to a single element is fitly rendered in its entirety as a holy libation to Him who inspired it and guarded it from all evil that could harm it. The mixed kind is the senses, and for this nature has created the proper mixing-bowls.
ד׳
4[185] The eyes are the “bowls” of sight, the ears of hearing, the nostrils of the sense of smell, and each of the others has its fitting vessel. On these bowls the holy Word pours of the blood, desiring that our irrational part should be quickened and become in some sense rational, following the divine courses of the mind, and purified from the objects of sense, which lure it with all their deceitful and seductive force.
ה׳
5[186] And was not the consecrated didrachmon portioned out on the same principle? We are meant to consecrate one half of it, the drachma, and pay it as ransom for our own soul (Ex. 30:12, 13), which God who alone is truly free and a giver of freedom releases with a mighty hand from the cruel and bitter tyranny of passions and wrongdoings, if we supplicate him, sometimes too without our supplication. The other half we are to leave to the unfree and slavish kind of which he is a member who says “I have come to love my master,” that is “the mind which rules within me,” and my wife, that is “sense” the friend and keeper of the passion’s household, “and the children,” that is the evil offspring of the passions. “I will not go out free” (Ex. 21:5).
ו׳
6[187] For to such a kind, as its share in the didrachmon, must needs be given the lot which is no lot, the lot of dismissal which is the opposite of the dedicated drachma. The drachma is a unit, and a unit admits neither of addition nor subtraction, being the image of God who is alone in His unity and yet has fullness.
ז׳
7[188] Other things are in themselves without coherence, and if they be condensed, it is because they are held tight by the divine Word, which is a glue and bond, filling up all things with His being. He who fastens and weaves together each separate thing is in literal truth full of His own self, and needs nothing else at all.
