XXIII. (83) Therefore, the faculty which is common to us with the irrational animals, has blood for its essence. And it, having flowed form the rational fountain, is spirit, not air in motion, but rather a certain representation and character of the divine faculty which Moses calls by its proper name an image, showing by his language that God is the archetypal pattern of rational nature, and that man is the imitation of him, and the image formed after his model; not meaning by man that animal of a double nature, but the most excellent species of the soul which is called mind and reason. (84) On this account, Moses represents God as calling the blood the life of the flesh, though he is aware that the nature of the flesh has no participation in intellect, but that it does partake of life, as also does our whole body. And the soul of man he names the spirit, meaning by the term man, not the compound being, as I said before, but that Godlike creation by which we reason, the roots of which he stretched to heaven, and fastened it to the outermost rim of the circle of those bodies which we call the fixed stars. (85) For God made man, the only heavenly plant of those which he placed upon the earth, fastening the heads of the others in the mainland, for all of them bend their heads Downwards;”{29}{this idea is the same as that which Ovid has expressed in the beginning of the Metamorphoses, which may perhaps be translated–“And while all other creatures from their birth / With downcast eyes gaze on their kindred earth, / He bids man walk erect, and scan the heaven / From which he springs, to which his hopes are given.”} but the face of man he has exalted and directed upwards, that it might have its food of a heavenly and incorruptible nature, and not earthly and perishable. With a view to which, he also rooted in the earth the foundations of our body, removing the most insensible part of it as far as possible from reason; and the outward senses, which are as it were the body-guards of the mind, and the mind itself, he established at a great distance from the earth, and from all things connected with it, and bound it with the periodical revolutions of the air and of the heavens, which are imperishable.
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