[124] But sometimes she makes trial of her scholars, to test their zeal and earnestness; and then she does not meet them, but veils her face and sits like Tamar at the cross-roads, presenting the appearance of a harlot to the passers-by (Gen. 38:14, 15). Her wish is that inquiring minds may unveil and reveal her and gaze upon the glorious beauty, inviolate, undefiled and truly virginal, of her modesty and chastity.
[125] Who then is he, the investigator, the lover of learning, who refuses to leave aught of the things that are veiled, unexamined and unexplored? He can only be the chief captain, the king, whose name is Judah, who persists and rejoices in confessing and praising God. “He turned aside his path to her” (Gen. 38:16) it says, and said “Suffer me to come in unto thee.” “Suffer me,” he means (for he would not use force to her), “suffer me to see what is the virtue which veils its face from me, and what purpose it is prepared to serve.”
[126] And so then after he went in to her, we read of a conceiving or taking (Gen. 38:18). Who it is who conceives or takes we are not told in so many words. For the art or science that is studied does seize and take hold of the learner and persuades him to be her lover, and in like manner the learner takes his instructress, when his heart is set on learning.
[127] Often on the other hand some teacher of the lower subjects, who has chanced to have a gifted pupil, boasts of his own teaching power, and supposes that his pupil’s high attainments are due to him alone. So he stands on tiptoe, puffs himself out, perks up his neck and raises high his eyebrows, and in fact is filled with vanity, and demands huge fees from those who wish to attend his courses; but when he sees that their thirst for education is combined with poverty, he turns his back on them as though there were some treasures of wisdom which he alone has discovered.
[128] That is the condition called “having in the womb,” a swollen, vanity-ridden condition, robed in a vesture of inordinate pride, which makes some people appear to dishonour virtue, the essentially honourable mistress in her own right of the lower branches of knowledge.
[129] The souls then whose pregnancy is accompanied with wisdom, though they labour, do bring their children to the birth, for they distinguish and separate what is in confusion within them, just as Rebecca, receiving in her womb the knowledge of the two nations of the mind, virtue and vice, distinguished the nature of the two and found therein a happy delivery (Gen. 25:23). But where its pregnancy is without wisdom, the soul either miscarries or the offspring is the quarrelsome sophist who shoots with the bow (Gen. 21:20), or is the target of the bowman.
[130] And this contrast is to be expected. For the one kind of soul thinks that it receives in the womb, and the other that it has in the womb, and that is a mighty difference. The latter, supposing that they “have,” with boastful speech ascribe the choice and the birth to themselves. The former claim but to receive, and confess that they have of themselves nothing which is their own. They accept the seeds of impregnation that are showered on them from outside, and revere the Giver, and thus by honouring God they repel the love of self, repel, that is, the greatest of evils by the perfect good.