[34] Now Abraham and Jacob, as the Holy Scriptures tell us, became the husbands of several women, concubines as well as legitimate wives, but Isaac had neither more wives than one nor any concubine at all, but his lawful wife is the one who shares his home throughout.
[35] Why is this? It is because the virtue that comes through teaching, which Abraham pursues, needs the fruits of several studies, both those born in wedlock, which deal with wisdom, and the base-born, those of the preliminary lore of the schools. It is the same with the virtue which is perfected through practice, which Jacob seems to have made his aim. For many and different are the truths in which practice finds its exercising ground, truths which both lead and follow, hasten to meet it and lag behind, and entail sometimes greater, sometimes less labour.
[36] But the self-learnt kind, of which Isaac is a member, that joy which is the best of the good emotions, is endowed with a simple nature free from mixture and alloy, and wants neither the practice nor the teaching which entails the need of the concubine as well as the legitimate forms of knowledge. When God rains down from heaven the good of which the self is a teacher and learner both, it is impossible that that self should still live in concubinage with the slavish arts, as though desiring to be the father of bastard thoughts and conclusions. He who has obtained this prize is enrolled as the husband of the queen and mistress virtue. Her name in the Greek means “constancy”; in the Hebrew it is Rebecca.
[37] He who has gained the wisdom that comes without toil and trouble, because his nature is happily gifted and his soul fruitful of good, does not seek for any means of betterment:
[38] for he has ready beside him in their fulness the gifts of God, conveyed by the breath of God’s higher graces, but he wishes and prays that these may remain with him constantly. And therefore I think his Benefactor, willing that His graces once received should stay for ever with him, gives him Constancy for his spouse.