[82] Do you not notice that Sarah, that is dominant wisdom, says: “For whosoever shall hear of it shall rejoice with me” (Gen. 21:6)? Just suppose that someone has succeeded in hearing that Virtue has given birth to Happiness (Isaac). Straightway he will sing a hymn of sympathetic joy. As then fellowship in joy is his who has heard of Isaac’s birth, so is escape from death his who has looked with clear vision on self-mastery and God.
[83] But many souls, after being enamoured of endurance and self-mastery and divested of passions, nevertheless do experience the might of God and receive the turning to the lower way, the Master making a sharp distinction between Himself and His creation. He Himself stands ever steadfast, while His creation wavers and inclines in opposite directions.
[84] For the prophet says: “Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, where there was biting serpent and scorpion and drought, where there was no water, who brought out a spring of water for thee from the hard rock, who fed thee with manna in the wilderness, which thy fathers knew not” (Deut. 8:15 f.). You see that it is not only when attracted by the passions of Egypt that the soul falls in with the serpents, but when it is in a wilderness too it is bitten by pleasure, that subtle and snake-like passion. And pleasure’s mode of action has received a most appropriate name, for it is here called a biting.
[85] But not those in a wilderness only are bitten by pleasure, but those also who are a prey to scattering. For many a time have I myself forsaken friends and kinsfolk and country and come into a wilderness, to give my attention to some subject demanding contemplation, and derived no advantage from doing so, but my mind scattered or bitten by passion has gone off to matters of the contrary kind. Sometimes, on the other hand, amid a vast throng I have a collected mind. God has dispersed the crowd that besets the soul and taught me that a favourable and unfavourable condition are not brought about by differences of place, but by God who moves and leads the car of the soul in whatever way He pleases.
[86] To return to what I was saying, the soul falls in with a scorpion, which is “scattering,” in the wilderness, and the drought of the passions seizes upon it, until God send forth the stream from His strong wisdom and quench with unfailing health the thirst of the soul that had turned from Him. For the flinty rock is the wisdom of God, which He marked off highest and chiefest from His powers, and from which He satisfies the thirsty souls that love God. And when they have been given water to drink, they are filled also with the manna, the most generic of substances, for the manna is called “somewhat,” and that suggests the summum genus. But the primal existence is God, and next to Him is the Word of God, but all other things subsist in word only, but in their active effects they are in some cases as good as non-subsisting.