On the Allegories of the Sacred Laws (1.51-1.55)

If therefore you transgress any one of these laws, O soul! you will be injuring yourself, not God. On this account God says, You shall not plant for yourself: for no one works for God, and especially what is evil does not. And again, Moses adds: You shall not make for yourself. And in another place he says, You shall not make gods of silver with me, and you shall not make gods of gold for yourselves. For he who conceives either that God has any distinctive quality, or that he is not one, or that he is not uncreated and imperishable, or that he is not unchangeable, injures himself and not God. For you shall not make

Do you not see that—even though God were to conduct us to virtue, and though when we had been thus conducted we were to plant no tree which was barren, but only such as produce fruit, he would still command us to purify its impurity, that is to say, the appearing to plant. For he here orders us to cut away vain opinions; and vain opinions are a thing impure by nature.

And the man whom he had formed, Moses says, God placed in the Paradise,[*] for the present only. Who, then, is he in reference to whom he subsequently says that The Lord God took the man whom he had formed, and placed him in the Paradise to cultivate it and to guard it.[*] Must not this man who was created according to the image and idea of God have been a different man from the other, so that two men must have been introduced into the Paradise together, the one a fictitious man, and the other modelled after the image of God?

Therefore, the man modelled after the idea of God, is perceived not only amid the planting of the virtues, but, besides this, he is their cultivator and guardian; that is to say, he is mindful of the things which he has heard and practised. But the man who is factitious, neither cultivates the virtues, nor guards them, but is only introduced into opinions by the abundant liberality of God, being on the point of immediately becoming an exile from virtue.

Therefore, he calls that man whom he only places in Paradise, factitious; but him whom he appoints to be its cultivator and guardian he calls not factitious, but the man whom he had made. And him he takes, but the other he casts out. And him whom he takes he thinks worthy of three things, of which goodness of nature especially consists: namely, expertness, perseverance, and memory. Now, expertness is his position in Paradise; memory is the guarding and preservation of holy opinions; perseverance is the effecting of what is good, the performance of virtuous actions. But the factitious mind neither remembers what is good, nor does it, but is only expert, and nothing more; on which account, after it has been