ON THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY.

Ait differed. Yet it possessed much similarity to the first, so that you might easily recognize from which fountain the streams flowed. Hence the speech of the Chaldeans, Assyrians, Arabs, Ethiopians, and almost the entire East, approaches Hebrew so closely that the counterfeit corresponds to the genuine, and the corrupted to the pure. Therefore, just as speech was scattered and contaminated, so too was wisdom; the ages under which all things grow old, along with the other things that accompany mortality, were their ruin. Nevertheless, certain traces of the ancient wisdom appear, so that even if it is covered over with false and corrupt names, it can certainly offer some conjecture about itself to the industrious. Just as all men were fathered by one prince, God, and by one author of the race Referring to Adam, who saw God and His Angels in visible form and lived familiarly with them for a time, so there must have been a certain common wisdom concerning God and divine matters. There was another beginning of knowledge, born not from succession and revelation, but taken up through the contemplation of things and sound judgments—at first indeed more uncertain and obscure, yet having the same causes. For God, the father and discoverer of nature, just as He declared His majesty and divinity to man from that intimacy and revelation, so likewise He filled the world with order, beauty, numbers, and the forms of all the most beautiful things; offering various and certain opportunities even to those ignorant of His divinity, He showed Himself. It is indeed likely that the perfection of those ancestors was far clearer than this Philosophy which was born later from contemplation. But in the most recent ages, both that [ancient revelation] and this [contemplation], having arisen from a clearer light (just as the stars are usually obscured when the sun rises), were hidden or dulled, as if they had been its rays, and the dawn preceding the coming sun. Thus we shall say there have been three ages of Philosophy: the first like a vigorous, robust youth; which, when it had reached old age, began to be reborn and restored in the time of the [Greek] philosophers, though far unlike itself; and most recently, not only to be reborn, but to arise greater and more brilliant than it had ever been, spreading as much light everywhere as minds could grasp. You may see the same thing in the falling human offspring, which was indeed blessed in the beginning and would have been immortal if it had stood firm; then, having fallen into every evil and plague, its former dignity grew by many steps after it was restored. We are persuaded that all wisdom which has always existed among men was the same among all, not by these reasons alone, but indeed by those many and greatest examples, when we behold the traces of its truth scattered through all nations, which Moses once showed in his books to be inspected as if from a most remote watchtower: afterwards, the same truth, shining with the clearest light, filled the eyes and minds of all. It is most worthy, moreover, to show that all nations have always believed the same thing which all now believe and retain; and this for two reasons: both by judgment and teaching reason, with truth drawing all to its own confession; and from the most ancient Theology, which, coming from the first men, who were Armenians and Chaldeans, descended by perpetual successions to the other barbarians, and from them to the Greeks, as Plato also testifies. The Greeks were distinguished above all others in searching out and pursuing every doctrine: those among them who had betaken themselves to foreign nations for the sake of Philosophizing carried away much wealth from them, but as is right, the smallest part of those things which were hidden in their writings. It appears also that they understood certain things perversely, whether by their own error, or because even among those by whom the things were handed down, the truth did not retain its ancient dignity. For the Greeks also changed the names: some indeed not so much, others so greatly that no trace of the true, ancient appellation remained. Therefore, many things remained hidden from the Greeks and Romans—who once drew their race from the barbarians, and whose wisdom flowed down to them a long time afterward—which were held among them either then or many centuries before. For by the same progress, although not at the same time, both the human race and wisdom were propagated.