[4] Here we must speak of the reasons for this first flight and that second eternal banishment. On the first occasion Abraham and Sarah had not yet received their change of names, that is they had not yet been changed in character to the betterment of soul, but one was still Abram “the uplifted father,” pursuing the philosophy of the super-terrestrial, the philosophy which treats of air and the ways in which it is affected, pursuing too the sublimer philosophy of the heaven and the beings existing therein, which mathematics claims as the noblest branch of “physic” or nature-study;
[5] and Sarah was still Sarai, the type of personal sovereignty (her name means “my sovereignty”); she had not yet undergone the change to generic virtue; for all that is generic must be imperishable. She still had her place with the particular and specific virtues. She was still prudence, as shown in the “I,” and similarly temperance, courage, justice, all perishable, because the sphere in which they move is the perishable “I,”
[6] And therefore Hagar the lower or secular culture, though she has hastened to escape the stern and gloomy life of the virtue-seekers, will return to that same life which as yet is unable to hold the heights of the generic and imperishable, still clinging to the particular and specific region in which the lower is preferred to the highest.
[7] But at the later stage Abram leaves the study of nature for the life of the wise, the lover of God. His name is changed to Abraham, meaning “the chosen father of sound,” for to “sound” is the function of the uttered word or reason, whose father is the mind when it has grasped the good. Sarai again quits personal sovereignty to become Sarah, whose name is “sovereign,” and this means that instead of being specific and perishable virtue she has become generic and imperishable.
[8] Then too there shines upon them the light of Isaac—the generic form of happiness, of the joy and gladness which belongs to those who have ceased from the manner of women (Gen. 18:11) and died to the passions—Isaac, whose heart is in the pursuit of no childish sports, but those which are divine. When all this is come to pass, then will be cast forth those preliminary studies which bear the name of Hagar, and cast forth too will be their son the sophist named Ishmael.