[7] Since, then, the first step towards the possession of blessings is hope, and hope like a high road is constructed and opened up by the virtue-loving soul in its eagerness to gain true excellence, Moses called the first lover of hope “Man,” thus bestowing on him as a special favour the name which is common to the race (for the Chaldean name for Man is Enos),
[8] on the grounds that he alone is a true man who expects good things and rests firmly on comfortable hopes. This plainly shows that he regards a despondent person as no man but a beast in human shape, since he has been robbed of the nearest and dearest possession of the human soul, namely hope.
[9] And, therefore, in his wish to give the highest praise to the hoper, after first stating that he set his hope on the Father and Maker of all, he adds, “this is the book of the coming into being of men,” though fathers and grandfathers had already come into being. But he held that they were the founders of the mixed race, but Enos of that from which all impurity had been strained, in fact of the race which is truly reasonable.
[10] For just as we give the title of “the poet” to Homer in virtue of his pre-eminence, though there are multitudes of poets besides him, and “the black” to the material with which we write, though everything is black which is not white, and “the Archon” at Athens to the chief of the nine archons, the Archon Eponymos, from whose year of office dates are calculated, so too Moses gave the name of man in pre-eminence to him who cherished hope and left unnoticed the many others as unworthy to receive the same title.
[11] He did well, too, in speaking of the book of the coming into being of the true man. The word was appropriate because the hoper deserves a memorial written not on pieces of paper which moths shall destroy but in the undying book of nature where good actions are registered.
[12] Further, if we reckon the generations from the first, the earth-born man, we shall find that he, who is called by the Chaldeans Enos and in our tongue Man, is fourth.
[13] Now the number four has been held in high honour by the other philosophers who devoted themselves to the study of immaterial and conceptual realities, and especially by the all-wise Moses who when glorifying that number speaks of it as “holy and for praise,” and why he so called it has been shewn in the former treatise.
[14] Holy, too, and praiseworthy is the hopeful man, just as on the contrary the despondent is unholy and blameworthy, since in all things he takes fear for his evil counsellor; for no two things are more at enmity with each other, men say, than fear and hope, and surely that is natural, for each is an expectation, hope of good, fear on the other hand of evil, and their natures are irreconcilable and incapable of agreement.