Judged Down to the Thought

Among the Greeks too, the men who are masters of poetry and of history say the same thing. Of Heracles: [a]

Being that kind of man, it was only fitting that he went mad, and only fitting that he lit a funeral pyre and burned himself to death. Of Asclepius, Hesiod says:

And Pindar says:

So either they were gods, and then they had no appetite for gold —

for what is divine lacks nothing and stands above craving; and then they did not die. Or else they were born human, and were wicked out of ignorance, and were beaten by money.

Why should I go on, and bring up Castor or Pollux or Amphiaraus — men born of men, so to speak, only yesterday and the day before, and now counted as gods — when they even hold that Ino became a god after her madness and all she suffered in it?

And of her son:

For if men who were loathsome and hated by the gods got the reputation of being gods — if Semiramis, the daughter of Derceto, a lustful and murderous woman, was taken for a Syrian goddess, and if on account of Derceto the Syrians worship doves, and Semiramis along with them (the impossible, of course: the woman turned into a dove — the story is in Ctesias) — then what is surprising about some men being called gods by their own generation because of the office they held and the absolute power they wielded? The Sibyl, whom Plato also mentions, says: [f]

Others were called gods for their strength, like Heracles and Perseus, and others for their craft, like Asclepius. So those to whom their own subjects handed the honor, or who took it as rulers themselves, came to share the name — some out of fear, others out of reverence. That is how Antinous came to be counted a god: through your ancestors’ kindness toward their subjects. The people who came after took the worship over without ever examining it.

Callimachus, you believe in the birth of Zeus and refuse to believe in his tomb; and while you think you are throwing a shadow over the truth, you are in fact announcing to people who did not know it that he is dead. When you look at the cave, you are reminded that Rhea gave birth; but when you see the coffin, you throw a shadow over a dead man — not seeing that only the uncreated God is eternal.

For either the stories the crowd and the poets tell about the gods are not to be believed, and the reverence paid to them is wasted — since beings whose stories are false do not exist — or, if the births, the love affairs, the murders, the thefts, the castrations, the thunderbolts are true, then they no longer exist: they stopped being, since they once came into being when they were not. And on what principle are we to believe some of it and disbelieve the rest, when the poets wrote their accounts up to make these gods grander than they were? Surely the very men through whom they came to be thought gods, the men who dressed their story up to be impressive, did not invent the things they suffered. So that we are not atheists — since we hold as God the Maker of this universe and the Word who comes from him — has now been proved, as far as I am able, if not as far as the subject deserves.

On top of this, they also make up stories against us about godless meals and godless couplings. They do it so that they can think they have some reason for hating us, and because they suppose that by frightening us they can either pull us away from the life we have set ourselves to, or make the rulers harsh and unrelenting by the sheer size of the charges. But they are playing games in front of people who know that from long ago — and not only in our own time — it has followed, by some divine law and reason, that vice makes war on virtue. [k]

That is how Pythagoras came to be burned to death along with three hundred others; how Heraclitus was driven out of the city of the Ephesians and Democritus out of Abdera, charged on top of everything else with being insane; and how the Athenians condemned Socrates to death. But just as those men were none the worse in point of virtue for what the crowd thought of them, so no thoughtless slander from anyone casts a shadow on the uprightness of our life. Our good name is with God.

Still, I will answer these charges too, though I am well aware that what I have already said has cleared me before you. Since you surpass everyone in understanding, you know this: people whose life is measured against God as against a builder’s line, so that each of us may come before him blameless and beyond reproach — such people will never come even to the thought of the smallest sin.

For if we were convinced that we would live only this life here, then you might well suspect us of sinning, enslaved to flesh and blood, or beaten by gain or by craving. But we know that God stands over what we think and what we say, night and day, and that he, being wholly light, sees even what is in our heart. So we are convinced that when we are released from this life we will live another one, better than the life here, a heavenly life and not an earthly one — staying beside God and with God, unshaken and untouched by suffering in our soul, not as flesh, even though we will have flesh, but as heavenly spirit. Or else, falling with the rest, we will live a worse life, and in fire. For God did not shape us the way he shaped sheep or pack animals, as a piece of work on the side, meant to perish and be wiped out. On these terms it is not likely that we would go looking for evil, or hand ourselves over to the great Judge to be punished.

It is no wonder, of course, that they make up stories about us like the ones they tell about their own gods — they even put those gods’ sufferings on display as mysteries. But if they meant to condemn coupling done freely and with no distinctions, they ought to have hated Zeus, who fathered children by his mother Rhea and by his daughter Kore and took his own sister as his wife; or else Orpheus, who made these stories up and made Zeus more unholy and more filthy than Thyestes himself. For Thyestes at least lay with his daughter following an oracle, wanting to gain the kingdom and take his revenge. [n]

We, on the other hand, are so far from making no distinctions that we are not even permitted to look at anyone with craving. For, he says, “Anyone who looks at a woman so as to crave her has already committed adultery in his heart.”

So then: we are not allowed to look at anything beyond what God shaped our eyes for, which was to be a light to us; a look taken for pleasure is adultery in us, since the eyes were made for other things; and we will be judged down to our thoughts. How could anyone doubt that people like that are chaste? Our reckoning is not with human laws, which a bad man can break and never be caught — at the outset, my masters, I gave you my assurance that the teaching we live by is taught by God. We have a law that makes the measure of righteousness this: ourselves and our neighbors together.

That is why, going by age, we think of some as sons and daughters, hold others as brothers and sisters, and give those further along in life the honor due to fathers and mothers. And for those we think of as brothers and sisters and by the other names of family, we take great care that their bodies stay unviolated and undefiled. For the word says to us again, “If anyone kisses a second time because he enjoyed it —” and it goes on, “So the kiss — or rather the act of reverence — must be handled with great care, since if it is muddied even a little in the mind, it puts us outside eternal life.”

So then, since we have the hope of eternal life, we think little of the things of this life — even of the pleasures of the soul. Each of us counts as his wife the woman he married under the laws we ourselves have laid down, and counts her his only so far as having children. For just as a farmer throws his seed into the ground and waits for the harvest, and does not sow on top of it, so for us the having of children is the measure of craving. You would find many among us, both men and women, growing old unmarried, in the hope of being closer to God. [r]

And if staying in virginity and living as a eunuch brings a person nearer to God, while going as far as the thought and the craving carries him away from God, then when we run from the thoughts we refuse the acts long before. Our work is not the practice of speeches but the display and the teaching of deeds — that a person either stays as he was born, or keeps to one marriage. A second marriage is adultery dressed up respectably. For, he says, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery,” which permits a man neither to divorce the woman whose virginity he ended nor to marry another after her. For a man who deprives himself of his first wife, even if she has died, is an adulterer under cover: he steps over the hand of God, since in the beginning God shaped one man and one woman, and he undoes the joining of flesh to flesh in that union, which was made for the partnership of the race.

And yet, being what we are — oh, why should I speak the things that must not be spoken? — what we hear is the old proverb: the prostitute rebuking the chaste woman. For these are the men who have set up a market for prostitution and built lawless houses for the young, for every kind of shameful pleasure; who do not spare even males, males working horrors on males, violating in every way the bodies that are the finest and best formed, and so dishonoring the beautiful thing God made — for beauty on earth does not make itself, but is sent by the hand and the mind of God. These men throw at us the very things they know about themselves and say about their own gods, boasting of those acts as dignified and worthy of gods. Adulterers and men who molest boys are the ones abusing those who live as eunuchs and those married only once — men who live like fish, for fish swallow whatever falls in their way, the stronger driving off the weaker. [u]

And this is what it really means to feed on human flesh: to use force against the very laws that you and your ancestors weighed against everything that is right before you laid them down. It has gone so far that not even the provincial governors you send out are enough for the lawsuits — and these are suits against people who, when they are struck, may not even hold themselves back from offering more, and who, when they are slandered, may not withhold a blessing. For it is not enough to be righteous (righteousness is paying back like for like); what is set before us is to be good and to bear evil patiently.

So what man in his right mind would say that people like us are murderers? You cannot eat human meat without killing someone first. They are lying about the first charge; and as for the second, if anyone asks them whether they have actually seen what they claim, not one of them is so far past blushing as to say he has. And we do have slaves, some of us more and some fewer, and there is no hiding anything from them — yet not even one of them has invented lies against us on this scale. They know we cannot bear even to watch a man being put to death, however justly. Who could accuse people like that of murder or of eating human beings? [x]

Who does not count the contests with weapons and with wild animals — above all the ones you yourselves put on — among the things worth taking seriously? But we hold that watching a man be killed is next door to killing him, so we have renounced such shows. How, then, can we commit murder, when we will not so much as look on, for fear of rubbing guilt and defilement into ourselves?

And we are the ones who say that women who use drugs to bring on a miscarriage are committing murder, and will have to give God an account of the abortion. On what reasoning, then, could we be murderers? It does not belong to the same person to hold that the living creature in the womb is alive and therefore a care to God, and then to kill it once it has come out into life; or to refuse to expose a newborn, on the ground that those who expose them are killing their own children, and then to destroy the child once it has been raised. We are the same everywhere and in everything: slaves to reason, and not its masters.

Who, then, believing in a resurrection, would make himself into a tomb for bodies that are going to rise? It does not belong to the same people to be convinced that our bodies will rise and then to eat them as though they will not; or to think that the earth will give back the dead it holds, while the dead a man has buried inside himself will never be demanded back. [z]

The opposite is what you would expect. People who think they will give no account of this life, badly or well spent, and that there is no resurrection — who reckon the soul perishes along with the body and is snuffed out in it — such people will hold back from no reckless act. But people who are convinced that nothing will go unexamined before God, and that even the body which served the soul’s unreasoning impulses and cravings will be punished along with it, have no reason at all to commit even the smallest sin.

And if it strikes anyone as sheer nonsense that a body which has rotted and come apart and vanished should be put together again, then those who do not believe may fairly give us a reputation for silliness — but not for wickedness; for the beliefs by which we deceive ourselves wrong nobody else. That bodies will rise is not our view alone, but the view of many of the philosophers as well. It would be beside the point to show that now, since I do not want to look as though I were dragging into the contest arguments that belong outside it — talking about what the mind grasps and what the senses grasp and how the two are put together, or arguing that the bodiless is older than the bodily and that what the mind grasps comes before what the senses grasp, even though it is what the senses grasp that we run into first, since bodies are put together out of bodiless things by the compounding of what the mind grasps, and what the senses grasp out of what the mind grasps. For nothing stands in the way, according to Pythagoras and Plato, of bodies being put together again, once they have come apart, out of the very same things they were first put together from. But let the discussion of the resurrection be set aside for now.

And you, who in every way and in all things, by nature and by your training, are good and moderate and kind to people and worthy of the throne — now that I have taken the charges apart and shown that we honor God, that we are considerate, and that we are disciplined in soul, give me the nod of your royal head. For who has a better claim to be granted what they ask than we do? We pray for your rule: that the kingdom may pass from father to son, which is the most just way of all, and that your empire may grow and increase, with everyone brought under your hand. And this is in our interest as well, so that we may lead a calm and quiet life, and may ourselves gladly carry out everything we are commanded. [ac]