Your God Is Your Belly

All these examples, I believe, are unknown to the people who get worked up about what we do — or else known by a bare reading, without any careful study. That is what you expect from the great mass of “the untaught” in that overconfident crowd, the Soulish. It is why we have steered our course straight through the separate kinds of fast, one at a time: full fasts, dry-food fasts, Stations. Out of the material we find in either Testament we have set down the good these dutiful practices do — going without food, cutting it back, putting it off — so as to refute the people who write them off as empty observances. And by showing, in the same way, what rank they have always held among religious duties, we answer the people who charge them with being new. For nothing that has always been is new, and nothing useful is empty. [a]

The question is still before us, though. Some of these observances were commanded by God to man, and so made the practice binding as law. Others were offered by man to God, and so discharged the obligation of a vow. But even a vow, once God has accepted it, becomes a law for the time to come, on the authority of the one who accepted it: to approve a deed already done is to order it done from then on. And this consideration silences the other side’s wrangling again. They say:

“Either it is false prophecy, if a spiritual voice is what sets up these ceremonies of yours; or it is heresy, if human presumption is what invented them.”

They find fault with the pattern the old arrangements ran by, and in the same breath they draw arguments out of that very pattern to throw back at us — arguments that the outright enemies of the old arrangements will be able to turn round on them in their turn. So they are bound either to drop those arguments or to take up the very duties they attack. It cannot be otherwise, and for this reason above all: whoever set these duties up, a spiritual man or a plain believer, they are aimed at the honor of the same God the old arrangements were aimed at. For beyond doubt, in the eyes of us who are all priests of one God only, the Creator, and of his Christ, both heresy and false prophecy are judged by a difference in the divinity involved. So far, then, I am content to defend my side either way, and I let my opponents take whichever ground they like. “It is the spirit of the devil,” you say, Soulish man. Then how is it that he commands duties that belong to our God, and commands that they be offered to no one but our God? Either argue that the devil is working alongside our God, or let the Paraclete be reckoned Satan. Or you claim it is “a human antichrist,” since that is the name John gives to heretics. Then how is it that this man, whoever he is, has directed these duties toward our Lord in our Christ’s name, when antichrists have always gone out teaching toward God but against our Christ? Which of the two, then, do you think proves the Spirit is among us — when he commands what our God has always commanded, or when he approves what our God has always approved?

But here you are again, driving boundary stakes around God: around his discipline as you did around his grace, around his ceremonies as you did around his gifts. Our observances are supposed to have stopped just as his benefits stopped, and so you deny that he still lays any duty on anyone, because here too “the Law and the prophets were until John.” The only thing left is to banish him altogether — since as far as you are concerned he has nothing left to do.

By now, in this as in everything else, “you are reigning, rich and full.” You are not cutting into the kind of sins that fasting reduces, not needing the kind of revelations that dry-food fasts draw out, not expecting the kind of wars of your own that Stations turn aside. Suppose the Paraclete had gone mute from John’s day on: we would have stood up as prophets to ourselves, and chiefly for this reason — not, I mean now, to bring God’s anger down by our prayers, nor to win his protection or his favor, but to fortify in advance the way of life that the “last times” will demand. [g]

That means laying down every kind of self-humbling. Prison has to become familiar to us. Hunger and thirst have to be practiced. We have to acquire the strength to bear both the absence of food and the worry about it, so that a Christian may walk into prison in the same condition as if he had just walked out of it — to suffer there no punishment but training, not the world’s tortures but his own regular practices; and to go out of custody to the last struggle with that much more confidence, carrying nothing of the flesh’s guilty pampering about him, so that the tortures have no material to work on. He is armored in a mere dry skin, cased in horn against the claws, the juice of his blood already sent on ahead of him like his soul’s baggage — and the soul herself now hurrying after it, having learned death intimately already by fasting often.

Your habit, plainly, is to keep cook-shops going in the prisons for martyrs you cannot trust, in case they miss their usual comforts, grow tired of living, and trip over the strange new discipline of going without. Your celebrated Pristinus had never once met that discipline — your martyr, not a Christian one. He had been stuffed full for a long time, since the “free custody” now in fashion gave him every chance, and he was under obligation, I suppose, to all the baths (as if they were better than baptism), to every retreat of pleasure (as if they were better hidden than the Church’s), and to every attraction of this life (as if they were worth more than the attractions of the life that lasts) — obligation, that is, not to be willing to die. Then, on the very last day of the trial, at noon, you dosed him beforehand with drugged wine as an antidote and left him so limp that when he was tickled with a few claws — his drunkenness made it feel like tickling — he could no longer answer the magistrate asking him whom he confessed as Lord. Put on the rack for that silence, able to bring out nothing but hiccups and belches, he died in the very act of denying his faith. This is why the men who preach sobriety are “false prophets,” and the men who practice it are “heretics.” Why hesitate, then, to believe that the Paraclete you deny in a Montanus is present in an Apicius?

You lay it down as a rule barring our case that the ceremonies of this faith are fixed by the Scriptures or by the tradition of our forefathers, and that no further observance may be added, because innovation is not allowed. Stand on that ground if you can. See, I charge you with fasting on days besides the Passover, outside the limits of those days when “the Bridegroom was taken away”; with slipping in the half-fasts of Stations; and with living, now and then, on bread and water, whenever it has seemed right to each of you. “Those things,” you answer, “are done by choice, not by command.” Then you have shifted your ground: you went past tradition when you took up observances that were never fixed. [l]

And what sort of thing is it to allow to your own choice what you will not allow to God’s command? Is a human will to have more license than divine power? I keep in mind that I am free from the world, not from God. So it is my part to pay my Lord an act of respect without being prompted to it from outside, and his part to command. I ought not only to obey him willingly but to court him: obedience I render to his command, courtship to my own choice.

It is enough for me, in any case, that even the overseers habitually order fasts for the whole body of the church — not, I mean, for the special purpose of taking up a collection, as your begging fashion has it, but sometimes from some particular cause of concern in the church. So if you practice self-humbling at the bidding of a man’s edict, and all of you together, how is it that in our case you brand the very unity of our fasts, our dry-food fasts, and our Stations? Unless, of course, what we are sinning against is the decrees of the senate and the emperors’ orders forbidding “assemblies.”

The Holy Spirit, preaching in whatever lands he chose and through whomever he chose, used to foresee trials about to fall on the church or disasters about to fall on the world, and in his character as Paraclete — that is, as Advocate, the one whose business is to win the judge over by pleading — he would issue orders for observances of this kind. At present, for instance, they are for practicing the discipline of sobriety and self-denial. We who receive him are bound to keep the appointments he made then. Look at the Jewish calendar and you will find nothing new in this: every generation after guards with inherited care the rules given to the fathers.

Besides, all through the provinces of Greece there are councils held at fixed places, gathered out of the churches everywhere. By them not only are the weightier questions handled for the common good, but the whole Christian name itself is represented and honored with great reverence. And how fine a thing this is, that under the standard of faith men should come together to Christ from every quarter! “See how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to live together in unity!” You do not find that psalm easy to sing except when you are at dinner with a good crowd. But those gatherings first learn, by the working of Stations and fasts, what it is “to grieve with those who grieve,” and so at last “to rejoice with those who rejoice.” And if we too, in our different provinces, present to one another in spirit, keep the very observances whose keeping this whole discourse has been defending, that is the law of the oath we are under.

So, keeping “seasons” for these things, and “days and months and years,” we are playing the Galatian. Plainly we are, if what we keep are Jewish ceremonies, the festivals of the Law. Those are the ones the apostle unteaches, putting down the continuance of the old covenant, which has been buried in Christ, and setting up the new. But if there is a new creation in Christ, our observances too are bound to be new. Otherwise, if the apostle has erased absolutely every devotion “of seasons and days and months and years,” why do we keep the Passover on an annual round in the first month? Why do we spend the fifty days that follow in nothing but rejoicing? Why do we give the fourth and sixth days of the week to Stations, and the day of Preparation to fasts? [s]

In any case, you yourselves sometimes carry a Station on through the Sabbath — a day never to be kept as a fast except at the Passover season, for a reason given elsewhere. With us, at all events, every day alike is kept by an ordinary consecration. So it will not be the principle that tells things apart that comes out ridiculous in the apostle’s eyes, since he is the one distinguishing “things new and old.” Here too it will be your own unfairness: you taunt us with the look of antiquity at the very moment you are charging us with novelty.

The apostle also condemns those who “order people to abstain from foods.” But he does it by the Holy Spirit’s foresight, condemning in advance the heretics who would impose permanent abstinence to the point of destroying and despising the Creator’s works — the sort I can find in a Marcion, a Tatian, or a Jupiter, the Pythagorean heretic of our own day; not in the Paraclete. For how narrow the reach of our “ban on foods” is! Two weeks of dry-food fasts in the year — and not even the whole of them, since the Sabbaths and the Lord’s days are left out — are what we offer to God, going without things we do not reject but only postpone. [w]

And further: writing to the Romans, the apostle strikes home at you, who run this practice down. “Do not,” he says, “undo the work of God for the sake of food.” What work? The one he speaks of when he says, “It is good not to eat meat and not to drink wine, for whoever serves in these things is pleasing to our God and wins his favor.” “One man believes he may eat anything; another, being weak, lives on vegetables. Let the man who eats not think little of the man who does not eat. Who are you, to judge another man’s servant?” “Both the one who eats and the one who does not eat give God thanks.” But if he forbids a human choice to be turned into a controversy, how much more a divine one. So he knew how to scold certain people for restricting and banning food — the ones who abstained out of contempt and not out of duty — and how to approve the ones who did it to honor the Creator, not to insult him.

And if he has “handed you the keys of the meat market,” allowing “anything” to be eaten in order to establish the exception of “what has been offered to idols,” he has still not put the kingdom of God inside the meat market. “For the kingdom of God,” he says, “is not food and drink,” and, “Food does not commend us to God.” Do not take that as said about a dry diet; take it rather about a rich and carefully dressed one. When he adds, “If we eat, we shall not have more; if we do not eat, we shall not have less,” the ring of the words fits you better than us. You are the ones who think you have more if you eat and less if you do not — and who disparage these observances for that reason.

And how shabby it is, the way you twist the fact that the Lord “ate and drank” with all comers into a favor to your own appetite. I think he must have fasted as well, since the ones he called blessed were not the full but the hungry and thirsty. He was the one who kept saying that food was not what his disciples supposed it was, but “the finishing of the Father’s work”; who taught us to work “for the food that lasts to eternal life”; who in our everyday prayer told us to ask for bread, and not for the wealth of Attalus along with it. In the same way Isaiah has not denied that God “has chosen” a fast. He has spelled out in detail the kind of fast God has not chosen: “On the days of your fasts your own wills are indulged, and you secretly sting everyone under your authority. Or you fast for abuse and strife, and you strike with your fists. That is not the fast I have chosen.” The fast he has chosen is the one he goes on to add — and by adding it he has not abolished fasting but confirmed it.

For even if he does prefer “works of righteousness,” it is still not without a sacrifice — and the sacrifice is a soul afflicted with fasting. He is, at any rate, the God who was pleased with no people that could not control its appetite, and with no priest or prophet either. To this day the “Graves of Craving” remain, where the people who were greedy for meat were buried: they gorged on the quails without digesting them and brought a sickness of the bowels on themselves. Eli breaks his neck at the doors of the temple, his sons fall in battle, his daughter-in-law dies in childbirth — that was the blow God’s hand owed a shameless household that had defrauded him of the meat of the sacrifices. [ac]

Shemaiah, a “man of God,” prophesied what would come of the idolatry King Jeroboam had brought in. The king’s hand withered and was restored on the spot; the altar of sacrifice was torn in two. Invited home by the king as a reward for these signs, he flatly refused to touch food at all in that place, since God had forbidden it. But soon afterward he rashly took food from another old man, who lied and claimed to be a prophet, and by the word of God spoken then and there over the table he was denied burial in his fathers’ graves. A lion rushed him on the road and brought him down, and he was buried among strangers. So he paid the penalty for breaking his fast.

These will stand as warnings to laypeople and to overseers alike — even spiritual ones — in case any of them has ever been guilty of an appetite out of control. Even in Hades the warning has not stopped speaking. There we see, in the rich banqueter, good dinners tortured; and in the beggar, fasts refreshed. Both had the same teachers, “Moses and the prophets.” Joel too cried out, “Consecrate a fast and a service,” foreseeing even then that other apostles and prophets would sanction fasts and would preach observances of special service to God. That is why even the people who court their idols — dressing them, decking them out in their shrine, greeting them at each appointed hour — are said to do them service.

More than that: the pagans know every form of self-humbling. When the sky is shut hard and the year is dry, barefoot processions are ordered by public proclamation. The magistrates lay their purple aside, reverse the rods of office, say the prayer, offer the victim. There are colonies, besides, where on top of these emergency ceremonies the people keep an annual rite: dressed in sackcloth and sprinkled with ashes, they press their idols with pleading, while the baths and the shops stay shut until three in the afternoon. They keep one single fire burning in public, on the altars, and not even water in their dishes. It is a Nineveh-style shutdown, I suppose. A Jewish fast, at any rate, is kept everywhere. Leaving the temples behind, all along the shore, in every open place, they go on sending prayer up to heaven for a long while. And though they spoil the duty with the dress and the trappings of mourning, still they do make a show of faith in going without, and they sigh for the slow evening star to come out and give them leave to eat. But it is enough for me that you, in heaping insults on our dry-food fasts, put them on a level with the chastity of an Isis or a Cybele. I accept the comparison — as evidence. It proves our practice divine, since the devil, who competes with everything divine, imitates it. Falsehood is built out of truth; superstition is put together out of religion.

So you are the more irreligious in the measure that a pagan is the more obedient. He, after all, sacrifices his appetite to a god that is an idol; you will not sacrifice yours to God. For your god is your belly, your lungs are a temple, your gut is an altar, your cook is the priest, your cooking smell is the Holy Spirit, your seasonings are the gifts of the Spirit, and your belching is prophecy.