On Drunkenness (96-100)

For it is said, that when Joshua heard the people crying out he said to Moses, "There is the sound of war in the camp. And he said, It is not the voice of men beginning to exert themselves in battle, nor is it the voice of men betaking themselves to flight, but it is the voice of men beginning revelry and drunkenness that I hear: and when he came near to the camp he saw the calf and the dances." [*] And the enigmatical meaning, which is concealed under these figurative expressions, we will explain to the best of our ability. [*]

Our own affairs are at one time in a state of tranquillity, and at another they behave as it were with unseasonable impetuosity and loud cries; and their tranquillity is profound peace, and their condition, when in an opposite state, is interminable war;

and the witness to this fact is one who has experienced its truth, and who cannot lie; for having heard the voice of the people crying out, he says to the manager and superintendent of the affairs, "There is a sound of war in the tent;" for as long as the irrational impulses were not stirred up, and had not raised any outcry in us, our minds were established with some firmness; but when they began to fill the place of the soul with all sorts of voices and sounds, calling together and awakening the passions, they created a civil sedition and war in the camp.

Very naturally, for where else should there be strife, and battle, and contention, and all the other deeds of interminable war, except in the life according to the body, which he, speaking allegorically, calls the camp? This life the mind is accustomed to leave, when under the influence of God it approaches the living God, contemplating the incorporeal appearances;

"for Moses," says the scripture, "having taken his own tent, fixed it outside the camp," [*] and that too not near it, but a long way off, and at a great distance from the camp. And by these statements he tells us, figuratively, that the wise man is but a sojourner, and a person who leaves war and goes over to peace, and who passes from the mortal and disturbed camp to the undisturbed and peaceful and divine life of rational and happy souls.