[63] But they whose natural wit is more dense and dull, or whose early training has been mishandled, since they have no power of clear vision, need physicians in the shape of admonishers, who will devise the treatment proper to their present condition.
[64] Thus ill-disciplined and foolish slaves receive profit from a master who frightens them, for they fear his threats and menaces and thus involuntarily are schooled by fear. All such may well learn the untruth, which will benefit them, if they cannot be brought to wisdom by truth.
[65] Thus too in dealing with dangerous sicknesses of the body, the most approved physicians do not allow themselves to tell the truth to their patients, since they know that this will but increase their disheartenment, and bring no recovery from the malady, whereas under the encouragement, which the opposite course of treatment gives, they will bear more contentedly their present trouble, and at the same time the disease will be relieved.
[66] For what sensible physician would say to his patient, “Sir, you will be subjected to the knife, the cautery or amputation” even if it will be necessary that he should submit to such operations. No one. For the patient will lose heart beforehand, and add to the existing malady of the body a still more painful malady of the soul and break down when faced with the treatment. Whereas if through the physician’s deceit he expects the opposite, he will gladly endure everything with patience, however painful the methods of saving him may be.
[67] So then the lawgiver, thereby being now approved as the best of physicians for the distempers and maladies of the soul, set before himself one task and purpose, to make a radical excision of the diseases of the mind and leave no root to sprout again into sickness which defies cure.
[68] In this way he hoped to be able to eradicate the evil, namely by representing the supreme Cause as dealing in threats and oftentimes shewing indignation and implacable anger, or again as using weapons of war for His onslaughts on the unrighteous. For this is the only way in which the fool can be admonished.
[69] And therefore it seems to me that with the two aforesaid maxims, “God is as a man,” and “God is not as a man,” he has linked two other principles closely connected and consequent on them, namely fear and love. For I observe that all the exhortations to piety in the law refer either to our loving or our fearing the Existent. And thus to love Him is the most suitable for those into whose conception of the Existent no thought of human parts or passions enters, who pay Him the honour meet for God for His own sake only. To fear is most suitable to the others.