XI. (54) Now the wicked also have a desire for concubines, that is, for vain opinions and doctrines; accordingly Moses tells us that Thimna, the concubine of Eliphah the son of Esau, bore Amalek to Eliphah.{6}{#ge 36:12.} Alas, for the eminent ignobleness of the descendant! And you will see this ignobleness the more clearly, if you abandon the idea that this expression is used about a man, and rather consider the soul, with a kind of anatomical dissection. (55) The historian then calls the irrational and immoderate desires and impetuosity of the passions, Amalek; now the name Amalek, being interpreted, means “the people looking up.” For as the power of fire consumes the materials which are offered to it, so in the same manner does passion, when boiling over lick up and destroy everything with which it meets. (56) And the father of this passion is very properly described as Eliphah; for this name, being interpreted, means “God has scattered me.” But does it not follow that when God scatters, and disperses, and discards the soul, banishing it from himself, irrational passion is at once engendered? For He plants the mind which can really behold him, and which is really attached to God, the vine of a good kind, stretching out its roots so as to make them everlasting, and giving it abundance of fruit for the acquisition and enjoyment of the virtues. (57) On which account Moses prays, saying, “Bring them in and plant them In,”{7}{#ex 15:17.} in order that those divine shoots may not be ephemeral, but long-lived and lasting for ever and ever. And banishing the unjust and ungodly soul, he disperses it and drives it to a distance from himself to the region of the pleasures and appetites and acts of injustice; and this region is, with exceeding appropriateness, called the region of the impious, more fitly than that one which is fabled as existing in the shades below. For indeed, the real hell is the life of the wicked, which is audacious, and flagitious, and liable to all kinds of curses.
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