The good farmer clears and grafts the soul

So he took hold of us from the beginning in this way and went round us by every means. When the greater part of his aim had been reached and it seemed settled that we would stay, from then on he set to work. He was like a good farmer with a piece of untilled land: either land not fertile at all, but salty and scorched, stony and crumbling; or land not wholly barren, nor lacking in growth, but even rich in growth, and yet fallow and neglected, matted hard with thorns and wild scrub and difficult to work. Or he was like a gardener with a plant that is wild and bears no cultivated fruit, and yet is not wholly useless, if someone skilled in the gardener's art should bring a cultivated shoot and graft it in, splitting the stock down the middle, then joining the two and binding them until they grow together and both are nourished. In this way you might see a mixed tree, a hybrid, but fruitful where it was fruitless, bearing the fruit of the good olive on wild roots. Or it may be a plant that is wild and yet not useless to a skilled gardener; or one that is cultivated and fruitful enough in other ways, but which, for want of skill, has again been left unpruned, unwatered and parched, choked by the many superfluous shoots sprouting there, so that it is hindered, the shoots getting in one another's way, from reaching full growth and bearing its fruit.

Such were we when he took us over. Going round us with his own farmer's skill, he examined not only what is visible to all and seen on the surface, but dug down and probed our innermost parts, asking questions, putting forward propositions, and listening to our answers. Once he had seen in us something not useless, not unprofitable, not beyond working, he dug, he turned the soil, he watered, he stirred everything, he brought to bear all his skill and care, and he cultivated us. The thorns and thistles (Genesis 3:18) and every kind of wild weed or plant that our soul threw up and put forth as it ran wild in its agitation, disordered and rash as it was, he cut down and rooted out entirely by refuting us and holding us back. He took us to task, and sometimes, quite in the manner of Socrates, he tripped us up in argument, whenever he saw us bolting from the rein altogether like wild horses, leaping off the road and running about aimlessly, until by a kind of persuasion and constraint, as with a bridle, the word from our own mouth, he brought us quietly to order under him.

At first this was hard for us and not without pain, since we were unused to it and not yet practiced in following an argument, when he brought his own reasoning to bear on us; but all the same he was cleansing us. When he had made us fit and had prepared us well to receive the words of truth, then at last, as on ground well worked and soft and ready to send up the seeds put into it, he set to work unsparingly, sowing the seed at the right time, and at the right time giving all the rest of his care as well, working each thing in its proper way. With the tools that belong to reason he sharpened and refined whatever in the soul was dull and spurious, whether it was so by nature or had grown thick from too much feeding of the body. He did this by the fine arguments and patterns of logical reasoning, which unwind one after another from the simplest first principles and turn in many ways until they advance into a baffling tangle hard to unravel. They roused us as if from sleep, and we were taught always to hold fast to the question before us, never slipping away from it, whether because of its length or because of its subtlety.