When the tyrant’s law ordered the male children to be destroyed, Moses was born. How, then, can we imitate by choice a birth that came about through circumstances beyond his control? Someone will surely say that our own birth is not something under our control, so how could anyone imitate the birth of this distinguished man? Yet there is no difficulty in beginning with what seems the hardest point to imitate.
Everyone knows that whatever is subject to change never remains exactly what it is. It is always becoming something different, with every change moving either toward what is better or toward what is worse. Let us take the story, then, as an illustration. The more material, passion-driven condition toward which human nature tends to slide is the feminine side of life—the offspring the tyrant is pleased to keep alive. But the firmness and intensity of virtue is the masculine offspring, hostile to the tyrant and suspected of rebellion against his rule.
Whatever is changing must, in this sense, be continually coming into being. Nothing in a changeable nature can remain forever exactly the same. But this kind of birth does not come from an impulse outside us, as bodily birth does. It comes from free choice. In a certain sense we are fathers of ourselves: we give birth to ourselves as whatever we wish to be, and by our own choice we shape ourselves into whatever form we choose—male or female, according to virtue or vice.
So it is entirely possible for us, against the tyrant’s will and to his grief, to come into the light through this nobler birth. The parents of this noble offspring can look on it with joy—by which I mean the thoughts that become fathers of virtue—and it can be kept alive, even though this is contrary to the tyrant’s purpose.
To uncover the riddle more plainly by taking our starting point from the story, the lesson is this: the life of virtue begins by being born to the enemy’s grief. I mean the kind of birth in which free choice serves as the midwife. No one can grieve his opponent unless he shows in himself the signs that prove victory over him.
The same free choice that gives birth to this courageous and virtuous child must also nurse it with the proper food and provide for it so that it can be saved from the water without harm. Those who hand their children over to the tyrant send them naked and unprotected into the stream. By the stream I mean the current of life, tossed by wave after wave of passion. Whatever enters that current is dragged under, submerged, and drowned.
But self-controlled and farsighted thoughts—the fathers of courageous offspring—act differently. When the necessities of life force them to send the good child down among life’s waves, they place the child safely in an ark so it will not sink. An ark is made by fastening together different boards. In the same way, education is built up from many different kinds of learning, and it carries the person inside it above the waves of life.
With this protection, a person will not wander for long in the turmoil of the waters, carried around by the force of the waves. Instead, he will reach the firm shore—that is, he will come outside the turmoil of ordinary life. The movement of the waters itself will carry him toward what is stable.
Experience itself teaches us this. The unstable rush of worldly affairs eventually casts out those who refuse to be submerged in human deceptions. It treats people whose virtue disturbs it as useless weight and pushes them away. Once someone has come outside such things, let him imitate Moses and not hold back his tears, even if he is safely enclosed in the ark. Tears are a sure guardian of those who are saved through virtue.
The king’s daughter is childless and barren, and I think we should properly understand her as the philosophy of those outside the faith. If she takes the young man as her own and has herself called his mother, the argument allows us for a time not to reject our connection with this mother in name only, as long as we still recognize immaturity in ourselves. But once someone has grown to maturity, as we learned in the case of Moses, he will regard it as shameful to be called the child of one who is barren by nature.