Φῶς ἐστι τῷ νῷ πρὸς θεὸν βλέπειν ἀεί

Greek Learning Greek
1

I was hoping you guys could help resolve a domestic squabble I’m having with GhatGPT4 (the o3 version is too priicy for me).
I interpreted the dative construction as possessive:

ϕῶς ἐστι τῷ νῷ πρὸς θεὸν βλέπειν ἀεί.

as “The mind has light to see god always.”
ChatGPT gives the following literal translation, which I find rather obscure (for all its “illumination”):
“It is light to the mind to look toward God always.”
When I asked for a less literal translation, it came up with these two:
A less literal but still faithful version could be:

“For the mind, to look toward God is light.”
or
“Looking toward God is the mind’s light.”
I’m not convnced by either of those but there’s no context to help out since it’s just an isolated translation exercise with no mention of the work or author.

Any opinions?

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It’s another of those “Menandrean” one-liners, which when shorn of their context (if they ever had any) are often less than pellucid. But this is relatively straighforward. "Light” more or less as in Dominus illuminatio mea (the motto of Oxford University), and “looking towards god with the mind” rings Platonic. I would construe τῷ νῷ with βλέπειν not with φῶς.

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