and the beautiful variegated fabric of God, even this world of ours, has been wrought in its completeness by a knowledge full of all wisdom, how can we do otherwise than welcome variegation as a tool for the making of knowledge?
[208] Its most holy image shall be enshrined in all the house of Wisdom both in heaven and on earth. And from it are derived the varieties of thinking which the Practiser’s labour creates, for after those of thorough-white he straightway saw those that were variegated, bearing the impress of the stamp of training.
[209] Third come the ashy-sprinkled. And yet what man of sound sense would not say that these also are of the variegated kind? The fact is that it is not about the difference between beasts that the lawgiver shews this deep concern, but rather about the way that leads to nobility of life.
[210] For he wishes the man who goes in quest of this to besprinkle himself with ashes and lustral water, inasmuch as it is recorded that earth and water mixed together and shaped were by the power of the Moulder of men set apart to form this body of ours, wrought as no handiwork, but a product of nature working all unseen.
[211] It is, then, the beginning of wisdom not to be forgetful of one’s own self, but ever to set before one’s eyes the elements of which one consists; for in this way a man would purge out of himself high vaunting, the most God-abhorred of evil things. For who, when he lays to heart that ashes and water are for him the beginnings of existence, will be puffed up by conceit and raised aloft?
[212] That is why the lawgiver required those who were about to sacrifice to besprinkle themselves with the materials I have mentioned. He held no one worthy of offering sacrifices who has not first come to know himself and comprehended human nothingness, inferring from the elements of which he is composed that he is nothing worth.