מי יורש קנייני אלוה נ״זWho is the Heir of Divine Things 57
א׳
1[280] No; by “fathers” he does not mean those whom the pilgrim soul has left behind, those who lie buried in the sepulchres of Chaldaea, but possibly, as some say, the sun, moon and other stars to which it is held that all things on earth owe their birth and framing, or, as others think, the archetypal ideas which, invisible and intelligible there, are the patterns of things visible and sensible here—the ideas in which, as they say, the mind of the Sage finds its new home.
ב׳
2[281] Others again have surmised that by “fathers” are meant the four first principles and potentialities, from which the world has been framed, earth, water, air and fire. For into these, they say, each thing that has come into being is duly resolved.
ג׳
3[282] Just as nouns and verbs and all parts of speech which are composed of the “elements” in the grammatical sense are finally resolved into the same, so too each of us is composed of the four mundane elements, borrowing small fragments from the substance of each, and this debt he repays when the appointed time-cycles are completed, rendering the dry in him to earth, the wet to water, the cold to air, and the warm to fire.
ד׳
4[283] These all belong to the body, but the soul whose nature is intellectual and celestial will depart to find a father in ether, the purest of the substances. For we may suppose that, as the men of old declared, there is a fifth substance, moving in a circle, differing by its superior quality from the four. Out of this they thought the stars and the whole of heaven had been made and deduced as a natural consequence that the human soul also was a fragment thereof.
