For the essence or substance of that other soul is divine spirit, a truth vouched for by Moses especially, who in his story of the creation says that God breathed a breath of life upon the first man, the founder of our race, into the lordliest part of his body, the face, where the senses are stationed like bodyguards to the great king, the mind. And clearly what was then thus breathed was ethereal spirit, or something if such there be better than ethereal spirit, even an effulgence of the blessed, thrice blessed nature of the Godhead.
[124] The fat is prohibited because it is the richest part and here again he teaches us to practise self-restraint and foster the aspiration for the life of austerity which relinquishes what is easiest and lies ready to hand, but willingly endures anxiety and toils in order to acquire virtue.
[125] It is for this reason that with every victim these two, the blood and the fat, are set apart as a sort of first fruits and consumed in their entirety. The blood is poured upon the altar as a libation, the fat because of its richness serves as fuel in place of oil and is carried to the holy and consecrated fire.
[126] Moses censures some of his own day as gluttons who suppose that wanton self-indulgence is the height of happiness, who not contented to confine luxurious living to cities where their requirements would be unstintedly supplied and catered for, demanded the same in wild and trackless deserts and expected to have fish, flesh and all the accompaniments of plenty exposed there for sale.
[127] Then, when there was a scarcity, they joined together to accuse and reproach and brow-beat their ruler with shameless effrontery and did not cease from giving trouble until their desire was granted though it was to their undoing. It was granted for two reasons, first to show that all things are possible to God who finds a way out of impassable difficulties, secondly to punish those who let their belly go uncontrolled and rebelled against holiness.
[128] Rising up from the sea in the early dawn there poured forth a cloud of quails whereby the camp and its environs were all round on every side darkened for a distance which an active man might cover in a day, while the height of their flight might be reckoned at about two cubits above the ground so as to make them easy to capture.
[129] It might have been expected that awestruck by the marvel of this mighty work they would have been satisfied with this spectacle, and filled with piety and having it for their sustenance, would have abstained from fleshly food. Instead they spurred on their lusts more than before and hastened to grasp what seemed so great a boon. With both hands they pulled in the creatures and filled their laps with them, then put them away in their tents, and, since excessive avidity knows no bounds, went out to catch others, and after dressing them in any way they could devoured them greedily, doomed in their senselessness to be destroyed by the surfeit.
[130] Indeed they shortly perished through discharges of bile, so that the place also received its name from the disaster which befell them, for it was called “Monuments of Lust”—lust than which no greater evil can exist in the soul as the story shows.
[131] And therefore most excellent are these words of Moses in his Exhortations, “Each man shall not do what is pleasing in his own sight,” which is as much as to say “let no one indulge his own lust. Let a man be well pleasing to God, to the universe, to nature, to laws, to wise men and discard self love. So only will he attain true excellence.”