HOW MOSES DISCHARGED THE PART OF A MILITARY LEADER.
Our Moses then is a prophet, a legislator, skilled in military tactics
and strategy, a politician, a philosopher. And in what sense he was a
prophet, shall be by and by told, when we come to treat of prophecy.
Tactics belong to military command, and the ability to command an army
is among the attributes of kingly rule. Legislation, again, is also one
of the functions of the kingly office, as also judicial authority.
Of the kingly office one kind is divine,--that which is according to
God and His holy Son, by whom both the good things which are of the
earth, and external and perfect felicity too, are supplied. “For,”
it is said, “seek what is great, and the little things shall be
added.”[1054] And there is a second kind of royalty, inferior to that
administration which is purely rational and divine, which brings to
the task of government merely the high mettle of the soul; after which
fashion Hercules ruled the Argives, and Alexander the Macedonians.
The third kind is what aims after one thing--merely to conquer and
overturn; but to turn conquest either to a good or a bad purpose,
belongs not to such rule. Such was the aim of the Persians in their
campaign against Greece. For, on the one hand, fondness for strife is
solely the result of passion, and acquires power solely for the sake
of domination; while, on the other, the love of good is characteristic
of a soul which uses its high spirit for noble ends. The fourth, the
worst of all, is the sovereignty which acts according to the promptings
of the passions, as that of Sardanapalus, and those who propose to
themselves as their end the gratification of the passions to the
utmost. But the instrument of regal sway--the instrument at once of
that which overcomes by virtue, and that which does so by force--is
the power of managing (or tact). And it varies according to the nature
and the material. In the case of arms and of fighting animals the
ordering power is the soul and mind, by means animate and inanimate;
and in the case of the passions of the soul, which we master by virtue,
reason is the ordering power, by affixing the seal of continence and
self-restraint, along with holiness, and sound knowledge with truth,
making the result of the whole to terminate in piety towards God. For
it is wisdom which regulates in the case of those who so practise
virtue; and divine things are ordered by wisdom, and human affairs by
politics--all things by the kingly faculty. He is a king, then, who
governs according to the laws, and possesses the skill to sway willing
subjects. Such is the Lord, who receives all who believe on Him and by
Him. For the Father has delivered and subjected all to Christ our King,
“that at the name of Jesus every knee may bow, of things in heaven, and
things in earth, and things under the earth, and every tongue confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”[1055]
Now, generalship involves three ideas: caution, enterprise, and the
union of the two. And each of these consists of three things, acting
as they do either by word, or by deeds, or by both together. And all
this can be accomplished either by persuasion, or by compulsion, or by
inflicting harm in the way of taking vengeance on those who ought to be
punished; and this either by doing what is right, or by telling what is
untrue, or by telling what is true, or by adopting any of these means
conjointly at the same time.
Now, the Greeks had the advantage of receiving from Moses all these,
and the knowledge of how to make use of each of them. And, for the sake
of example, I shall cite one or two instances of leadership. Moses, on
leading the people forth, suspecting that the Egyptians would pursue,
left the short and direct route, and turned to the desert, and marched
mostly by night. For it was another kind of arrangement by which the
Hebrews were trained in the great wilderness, and for a protracted
time, to belief in the existence of one God alone, being inured by the
wise discipline of endurance to which they were subjected. The strategy
of Moses, therefore, shows the necessity of discerning what will be of
service before the approach of dangers, and so to encounter them. It
turned out precisely as he suspected, for the Egyptians pursued with
horses and chariots, but were quickly destroyed by the sea breaking
on them and overwhelming them with their horses and chariots, so that
not a remnant of them was left. Afterwards the pillar of fire, which
accompanied them (for it went before them as a guide), conducted the
Hebrews by night through an untrodden region, training and bracing
them, by toils and hardships, to manliness and endurance, that after
their experience of what appeared formidable difficulties, the benefits
of the land, to which from the trackless desert he was conducting
them, might become apparent. Furthermore, he put to flight and slew
the hostile occupants of the land, falling upon them from a desert and
rugged line of march (such was the excellence of his generalship). For
the taking of the land of those hostile tribes was a work of skill and
strategy.
Perceiving this, Miltiades, the Athenian general, who conquered the
Persians in battle at Marathon, imitated it in the following fashion.
Marching over a trackless desert, he led on the Athenians by night,
and eluded the barbarians that were set to watch him. For Hippias, who
had deserted from the Athenians, conducted the barbarians into Attica,
and seized and held the points of vantage, in consequence of having a
knowledge of the ground. The task was then to elude Hippias. Whence
rightly Miltiades, traversing the desert and attacking by night the
Persians commanded by Dates, led his soldiers to victory.
But further, when Thrasybulus was bringing back the exiles from Phyla,
and wished to elude observation, a pillar became his guide as he
marched over a trackless region. To Thrasybulus by night, the sky
being moonless and stormy, a fire appeared leading the way, which,
having conducted them safely, left them near Munychia, where is now the
altar of the light-bringer (Phosphorus).
From such an instance, therefore, let our accounts become credible to
the Greeks, namely, that it was possible for the omnipotent God to make
the pillar of fire, which was their guide on their march, go before the
Hebrews by night. It is said also in a certain oracle,
“A pillar to the Thebans is joy-inspiring Bacchus,”
from the history of the Hebrews. Also Euripides says, in _Antiope_,
“In the chambers within, the herdsman,
With chaplet of ivy, pillar of the Evœan god.”
The pillar indicates that God cannot be portrayed. The pillar of light,
too, in addition to its pointing out that God cannot be represented,
shows also the stability and the permanent duration of the Deity, and
His unchangeable and inexpressible light. Before, then, the invention
of the forms of images, the ancients erected pillars, and reverenced
them as statues of the Deity. Accordingly, he who composed the
_Phoronis_ writes,
“Callithoe, key-bearer of the Olympian queen:
Argive Hera, who first with fillets and with fringes
The queen’s tall column all around adorned.”
Further, the author of _Europia_ relates that the statue of Apollo at
Delphi was a pillar in these words:
“That to the god first-fruits and tithes we may
On sacred pillars and on lofty column hang.”
Apollo, interpreted mystically by “privation of many,”[1056] means
the one God. Well, then, that fire like a pillar, and the fire in the
desert, is the symbol of the holy light which passed through from earth
and returned again to heaven, by the wood [of the cross], by which also
the gift of intellectual vision was bestowed on us.