Training Against Pleasure

Steadfastness too forces its way toward likeness to God, and its fruit is freedom from passion, won through endurance — as you will see if you keep in mind what is told about Hananiah, who belonged to a group that included the prophet Daniel, a man filled with faith from God. Daniel lived in Babylon as Lot lived in Sodom, and as Abraham, who a little later became the friend of God, lived in the land of the Chaldeans. The king of the Babylonians lowered Daniel into a pit full of wild animals; the King of all, the faithful Lord, brought him up unharmed. [a]

That is the kind of endurance the one who truly knows will have, precisely as one who knows. Under trial he will bless God, like noble Job. Swallowed by the great fish, like Jonah, he will pray, and faith will bring him back to prophesy to Nineveh. Shut in with lions, he will tame the wild animals; thrown into the fire, he will be sprinkled with dew and not burned. He will bear witness by night and bear witness by day — by word, by life, by the way he behaves, he will bear witness. Living in the Lord’s own house he will remain his close friend, sharing the same hearth in the Spirit: pure in the flesh, pure in heart, made holy in his speech. “The world,” it says, “has been crucified to him, and he to the world.” Carrying the Savior’s cross about with him, he will follow in the Lord’s own tracks, godlike, having become a holy of holies.

The divine law keeps every virtue in view, but it trains a person above all in self-control, laying that down as the foundation of the virtues. It disciplines us in advance toward self-control by forbidding us to eat what is fat by nature, such as the breed of pigs, which is all flesh. Meat like that is put to use by people who live for their table. They say that one of the philosophers, explaining where the word for pig comes from, said it was really “sacrifice-beast,” since the animal is good for nothing but slaughter and killing; life was given to it for no other purpose than to swell out with meat. In the same way, to hold our desires down, the law forbade eating fish that have neither fins nor scales, since these are fleshier and fatter than the rest. That, in my opinion, is why the mystery rites not only forbade touching certain animals, but also took away certain parts of the animals they killed in sacrifice, for reasons the initiated know. So if we are to keep control of the stomach, and of what is below the stomach, plainly we heard from the Lord long ago that craving is to be reined in by the law.

And this will be fully done if we honestly condemn what feeds craving — I mean pleasure. They define it as a mild, smooth stirring with some sensation attached. Menelaus, they say, was held fast by it. After Troy fell he rushed at Helen to kill her, since she had caused such disasters, and he could not do it: her beauty overpowered him and set him thinking of pleasure. So the tragic poets jeered and threw the insult in his face:

And again:

I agree with Antisthenes when he says: “If I could catch Aphrodite, I would shoot her down; she has ruined many fine and good women of ours.” He also says that Eros is a fault of nature, and that the poor wretches who fall under its power call their disease a god. The words show that stupid people are beaten because they do not understand pleasure. We must give it no room, even if it is called a god — that is, even though God gave it for the necessary business of having children. Xenophon calls pleasure a vice in so many words: “You wretch, what good do you know? What honorable aim do you have? You do not even wait until you want something sweet: you eat before you are hungry and drink before you are thirsty. To make eating pleasant you hunt out fancy cooks; to make drinking pleasant you lay in costly wines; and in summer you run about looking for snow. To make sleeping pleasant you provide not only soft beds but supports for the couches.” So, as Aristo said, against the whole tetrachord — pleasure, pain, fear, and craving — there is need of a great deal of exercise and struggle.

Pleasure, Plato says, turns even the minds of men reckoned serious into wax; for “every pleasure and every pain nails the soul to the body” — the soul of a man who does not cut himself loose and crucify himself away from the passions. The Lord says: “Whoever loses his life will save it.” That means either giving it up by putting it in danger for the Lord’s sake, as he did for us, or loosening it from partnership with the life it is used to. For if you will untie your soul, draw it back and set it apart — this is what the cross means — from the delight and pleasure that is in this life, you will have it, found and at rest in the hope we look for. And this would be the practice of dying: to be content with the desires that are measured by nature alone and do not go past the limit of what is natural, either by excess or by going against nature, which is where the possibility of sinning starts. That is why the divine apostle says: “We must put on the full armor of God, so that we can stand against the tricks of the devil; for the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly, but powerful before God for pulling down strongholds, tearing down arguments and every high thing that lifts itself up against the knowledge of God, and taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.”

What is needed is a man who will use, in a praiseworthy and discriminating way, the things the passions rise out of: riches and poverty, honor and dishonor, health and sickness, life and death, hard work and pleasure. For to treat things that really differ as making no difference, we ourselves must have become very different — having been badly weakened beforehand, and having indulged ourselves in ignorance, warped by a bad upbringing and training. The plain word of our philosophy declares the passions to be impressions on a soul that is soft and yielding — the seal marks, so to speak, of the spiritual powers we have to wrestle with. It is the business of the powers that mean harm, in my opinion, to try to produce something of their own make-up in everything, so as to master those who have renounced them and make them their own. It follows, as you would expect, that some are beaten. But when men take up the contest with more of an athlete’s energy, those powers, after fighting in every style and pressing on through blood right up to the victor’s crown, give up the battle and stand admiring the winners.

Of things that move, some move by impulse and mental impression, as animals do; others move by being shifted about, as lifeless things are. Plants, they say, are moved by being shifted, for the sake of growth — if we grant them that plants are lifeless. A stone, then, has only a fixed condition. A plant has a nature. Animals without reason have impulse and perception, and the two properties already named as well. But the reasoning power belongs to the human soul alone, and it ought not to be pushed along the way animals without reason are; it ought to sort out its impressions and not be swept away by them. So the powers I have spoken of hold out beautiful sights, honors, adulteries, pleasures and other such alluring fantasies in front of easily led spirits, the way cattle drovers hold out branches to the herd. Then, having fooled people who cannot tell true pleasure from false, or the fading and whorish from the holy beauty, they lead them off into slavery. And every deceit, by pressing steadily on the spirit, stamps its own image on it; and the soul goes about carrying the image of the passion without knowing it — an image that begins with the bait and with our own consent.

Basilides’ followers are in the habit of calling the passions attachments. They say that these are in essence certain spirits fastened onto the reasoning soul through some original disturbance and confusion, and that other spirits then grow onto those — bastard natures of a different kind, of the wolf, the ape, the lion, the goat — whose properties show themselves around the soul and make its cravings like the animals’. For they copy the actions of the creatures whose properties they carry. And they are not only bound up with the impulses and perceptions of animals without reason: they rival even the movements and the beauties of plants, since they carry plant properties fastened on them too. They also have the properties of a fixed condition, such as the hardness of steel. We will argue against this teaching later on, when we deal with the soul. For now only this needs pointing out: on Basilides’ account a human being keeps the look of the wooden horse of the old story, holding a whole army of such different spirits in one body. Basilides’ own son Isidorus, in his book On the Soul Attached to Us, agrees with the teaching, and then, as though convicting himself, writes: “For if I persuade anyone that the soul is not divided, and that the passions of the wicked are caused by the force of the attachments, then the worthless sort of men will have no small excuse for saying, ‘I was compelled, I was carried away, I did it against my will, I acted unwillingly’ — while the man himself led the way in desiring evil things and did not fight off the assaults of the attachments. But we must show ourselves masters of the lower creation inside us by gaining the upper hand in the reasoning part.” For he too assumes two souls in us, like the Pythagoreans, whom we will glance at later.

Valentinus too, in a letter to certain people, writes about the attachments in these very words: “There is one who is good, and his presence is the revealing, which comes through the Son; and through him alone can the heart become pure, when every evil spirit is driven out of it. The crowd of spirits living in the heart will not let it be pure; each of them does his own work, and again and again they insult it with indecent cravings. The heart seems to be treated rather like a roadside inn: an inn gets holes and ruts knocked into it and is often filled with dung, because men live filthily in it and take no care of a place that belongs to somebody else. That is how it goes with the heart as long as nobody takes thought for it — unclean, and the home of many demons. But when the only good Father visits it, it is made holy and shines with light. And the man who has a heart like that is so blessed that he will see God.”

Then let them tell us this: why was a soul like that not cared for from the beginning? Either it was not worthy — and somehow care comes to it out of repentance — or else it is a nature that is saved, as he would have it; and in that case it must, of necessity, have been cared for from the beginning because of its kinship, and gave the unclean spirits no way in except by being forced and found weak. If he would grant that it chose the better on repenting, he will be saying so against his will, since that is what the truth we hold teaches: that salvation comes from a change brought about by obedience, and not from one’s nature. For just as the vapors that rise from the earth and from marshes gather into mists and banks of cloud, so the vapors of fleshly cravings put the soul in a bad condition, scattering the idols of pleasure in front of it. And so they spread darkness over the light of the mind, the spirit drawing to itself the vapors that rise from craving and thickening the masses of the passions by keeping on in pleasures. Gold does not come out of the ground in a lump; it is purified by smelting, and then, once it is pure, it is called gold, the earth in it having been cleaned away. “Ask, and it will be given you” is said to those who are able of themselves to choose what is best. As for how we say that the devil’s powers and the unclean spirits sow into the sinner’s soul, I need say no more, once I bring in as a witness the apostolic Barnabas — and he was one of the seventy, and a fellow worker of Paul — who says: “Before we believed in God, the dwelling place of our heart was unsteady, a temple really built with hands; for it was full of idolatry and was a house of demons, because we did what was against God.”

So he says that sinners carry on the sort of activity that suits demons; he does not say that the spirits themselves live in the unbeliever’s soul. That is why he adds: “See that the temple of the Lord is built gloriously. Learn how: having received forgiveness of sins, and having set our hope on the Name, let us become new, created again from the beginning.” What he says is not that demons are driven out of us, but that the sins we commit before believing — sins like theirs — are forgiven. And he rightly sets against that what comes next: “So God truly lives in our home. He lives in us. How? The word of his faith, the calling of his promise, the wisdom of his statutes, the commands of his teaching.”

I know that I have run into a sect whose head used to say that he fought pleasure by means of pleasure — this fine “knower” making a sham attack on pleasure, for he claimed to be one who knows. He said it was nothing much for a man who had never tasted pleasure to keep away from it, but that not to be beaten when you have been mixed up in it, that was something; and so he trained himself in pleasure by means of pleasure. The wretched man did not see that he was deceiving himself by the craftiness of self-indulgence. Aristippus of Cyrene plainly held the same opinion — the sophist who made his boast about truth. So when he was reproached for living with the Corinthian courtesan, he said: “I have Lais; Lais does not have me.”

The same sort are the people who say they follow Nicolaus, quoting a saying of his that they twist: that the flesh must be abused. The good man was showing that pleasures and cravings must be checked, and that by such training the impulses and appetites of the flesh must be worn away. But they hand themselves over to pleasure like goats and lead lives of self-indulgence, as though they were insulting the body — not realizing that the body is being worn away in any case, since it is dissolvable by nature, while their soul is buried in the mud of vice. They follow the teaching of pleasure itself, not of the apostolic man. How do they differ from Sardanapalus, whose life the epigram shows?

The feeling of pleasure is not a necessity at all; it goes along with certain natural needs — hunger, thirst, cold, marriage. If it were possible to drink, or take food, or father children without it, no other use for it could be shown. Pleasure is not a function, or a state, or any part of us. It was brought into life as a helper, the way they say salt was brought in to season food. But when it throws off restraint and rules the house, it produces craving first of all, which is an unreasoning leaning and impulse toward whatever gratifies it. That is what led Epicurus to lay down pleasure as the philosopher’s aim: he makes a god of a sound bodily condition and of the settled hope about it. For what is luxury but the greedy gluttony and the excess of people given over to their own comfort? Diogenes puts it tellingly in a tragedy:

And what comes after that is in foul language, but worthy of the men who live for pleasure.

That is why the divine law seems to me to have no choice but to threaten, and to use fear, so that by caution and attention the philosopher may win and keep freedom from anxiety, never stumbling and never sinning in anything. Peace and freedom are not won any other way than by ceaseless, unyielding struggle with our cravings. These are tough Olympic opponents, sharper than wasps, so to speak; and Pleasure above all is at work not only by day but at night, plotting in dreams with witchcraft, laying snares and stinging. How, then, can the Greeks be right any longer to run the law down, when they themselves teach that Pleasure is the slave of fear? Socrates tells people to “be on your guard against what tempts you to eat when you are not hungry and to drink when you are not thirsty, and against the glances and kisses of the beautiful; they can inject a deadlier poison than scorpions and spiders.” And Antisthenes said he would rather go mad than be pleased. And Crates of Thebes says:

And at last he draws the conclusion:

In other words, he writes plainly that what stops the unbridled bent toward lovemaking is hunger — or a noose.

The comic poets bear witness too, while they belittle the teaching of Zeno the Stoic, to something like this:

None of these men, then, is ashamed to confess openly the advantage that comes of caution. And the wisdom that is true and not against reason — trusting not in bare words and oracles but in armor that cannot be pierced and in mysteries that do their work, and giving itself to God’s commands and to exercise and practice — receives a divine power in proportion to the inspiration it has from the Word.

The aegis of the poets’ Zeus has already been described like this:

But to people able to understand salvation rightly, I do not know what will seem dearer than the seriousness of the Law, and Reverence, who is its daughter. When someone is said to pitch the note too high — as the Lord too says of certain people, so that some of those whose longing is toward him may not sing off key and out of tune — I do not take it as really pitching too high, but as said with an eye to the sort of men who will not take up the divine yoke. To those who are slack and feeble, what is in the middle seems too high; to those who are unjust, what comes to them seems severe justice. Men who are ready to pardon because they are friendly toward sins suppose truth to be harshness, and strictness savagery, and the man who will not sin along with them and be dragged along with them to be pitiless. Tragedy puts it well, then, about Hades:

For even if you are not yet able to do the things the Law commands, still, since the noblest examples are set before us in it, we can feed and increase our love of freedom, and so make progress the more eagerly, as far as we can — welcoming some things, imitating others, fearing others. That is how the righteous of long ago, who lived by the law, were “not from a storied oak or from a rock”: because they wanted to be true philosophers they took hold of God and gave themselves to him entirely, and were counted under faith. Zeno said a good thing about the Indians: that he would rather have seen one Indian roasted than have learned every argument there is about bearing pain. But we have plenty set before our eyes every day — martyrs burned, impaled, beheaded. All of them were trained by the fear the law inspires, the fear that leads like a paidagogos to Christ, to show their reverence for God with their blood. “God stood in the assembly of the gods; he judges in the midst of the gods.” Who are they? Those who are stronger than Pleasure, who rise above the passions, who know what they are doing — the ones who truly know, who are greater than the world. And the Lord says: “I said, You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High.” To whom is the Lord speaking? To those who reject, as far as they can, everything that belongs to man. And the apostle says: “You are no longer in the flesh, but in the Spirit.” And again he says: “Though we walk in the flesh, we do not wage war according to the flesh.” “For flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, and what decays does not inherit what does not decay.” “Look, you will die like men,” the Spirit has said, refuting us.

So we must train ourselves to take care about the things that fall under the power of the passions, running — as men who are truly philosophers do — from the foods that stir up craving, and from loose living in bed and in luxury. The sensations that tend toward luxury, which other people count as solid pay, must count as that for us no longer. For God’s greatest gift is self-control. He himself has said: “I will never leave you or forsake you,” having judged you worthy by a true choosing. So, while we try in reverence to go forward, the Lord’s mild yoke will have been laid on us, from faith to faith, one charioteer driving each of us on toward salvation, so that the fitting fruit of blessedness may be won. Exercise, according to Hippocrates of Cos, is “health not only for the body but for the soul — fearlessness in the face of hard work, and a ravenous appetite for food.”