The Works of Philo Judaeus, Vol. 2

The guards are the mutilation of the organs of the senses, and disease, as I have said before, by which the mind is often precipitated into disaster. These things are all the results of fortune—very grievous and intrinsically miserable—but still, if compared with those which are brought on ourselves by our own deliberate will, they are far lighter.

VII. Let us now, in its turn, consider what constitutes the united body of evils voluntarily incurred. Our soul is capable of being divided into three parts: one division is said to have fallen to the lot of the mind and of reason, the second to passion, and the third to appetite. Each separate one of these has its own peculiar evils, and they also share common and mutual diseases. The mind reaps the harvest that folly, cowardice, intemperance, and injustice sow. Passion brings forth frantic and insane strife and conflict, along with all the other numerous evils with which it is pregnant. Appetite disseminates in every direction the impetuous and fickle loves of youth, which descend upon every object—animate or inanimate—that it chances to meet. For then, as if in a vessel where the sailors, passengers, and pilots had all, under the influence of insanity, agreed to destroy it, those who have joined in the plot against the ship are nonetheless involved in the same destruction.

For the heaviest of all evils, and almost the only one that is incurable, is the unanimous energy of all the parts of the soul agreeing to commit sin. Not one of these parts is able to act with soundness—just as is the case in an evil affecting a whole nation—so as to heal those that are sick. Instead, the physicians are as diseased as their patients, overwhelmed by a pestilential malady and weighed down under a confessed calamity.

Of this great evil, that great deluge described by the law-giver Referring to Moses. is an image. For the torrents from heaven continually pour down cataracts of wickedness with impetuous violence, and the springs from the ground (by which I mean the body) continually burst up and pour forth streams of every passion in great numbers and vast size. These, uniting and being mingled in the same stream, are thrown into confusion, and overthrow the whole region of the soul with incessant eddies and whirlpools. “For,” says Moses, “the Lord God,