The Tyranny of Custom

But, you say, it is not reasonable to overturn a custom handed down to us from our fathers. Then why do we not still live on our first food, milk, which our nurses got us used to from the day we were born? Why do we add to our father’s estate, or spend it down, instead of keeping it exactly as it came to us? Why do we no longer throw up in our fathers’ laps, or go on doing the other things that got us laughed at when we were infants at our mothers’ breasts — why did we straighten ourselves out, even when no good tutor happened to come our way? And think of a voyage: a detour off the course is costly and risky, and even so it somehow strikes us as sweet. In life, then, will we not leave behind the custom that is wicked and passion-ridden and godless — even if our fathers take it hard — and turn aside toward the truth and go looking for the one who is really our Father, shoving custom away like a poisonous drug? This is the finest of the tasks I have taken in hand: to show you that it is out of madness, out of this three-times-wretched custom, that reverence for God came to be hated. A good so great would never have been hated and outlawed — nothing greater has ever been given by God to the human race — if you had not been swept off by custom and then stopped your ears against us. Like stiff-necked horses fighting the reins, taking the bit in your teeth, you bolted away from what we were saying. You wanted to shake us off, the drivers of your life; and carried by your own folly toward the cliffs of destruction, you took God’s holy Word for an accursed thing. And so, as Sophocles has it, the wages of your choice follow you: [a]

And you do not know that of all truths this is the truest: the good, who revere God, will get a good return for having honored what is good, while the wicked on the other side will get the punishment that matches. And for the ruler of evil himself a torment hangs ready. The prophet Zechariah threatens him with it: “May the one who chose Jerusalem rebuke you. Look — is this not a brand snatched out of the fire?”

What is this appetite for death by choice that has settled into people? Why have they run for shelter to this deadly brand, which will burn them up along with it, when it is open to them to live well by God and not by custom? God makes a gift of life; but wicked custom, once we have left this place, rubs in a useless repentance along with punishment. “The fool learns by suffering” — learns how superstition destroys and reverence for God saves. Let one of you take a look at the men who serve the idols: hair matted with filth, clothes squalid and torn to rags, never once near a bath, fingernails grown out like an animal’s claws, and many of them with their genitals cut away. By what they do they show that the idols’ precincts are graves, or prisons. They look to me like men mourning the gods rather than worshiping them, and what they suffer deserves pity rather than the name of reverence. You see all this and still go about blind? You will not look up to the Master of all and Lord of the universe? You will not run out of these dungeons and escape to the mercy that comes down from heaven? For God, out of the greatness of his love for people, holds on to a person the way the mother bird flies to a chick that has fallen out of the nest; and if some crawling thing opens its mouth over the chick,

And God the Father searches out the thing he made, and heals the fall, and chases off the beast, and picks the chick up again, urging it to fly back to the nest.

Dogs that have wandered off track down their master by scent; horses that have thrown their rider come back at a single whistle from their master. “The ox knows its owner,” it says, “and the donkey its master’s feeding trough; but Israel has not known me.” And what does the Lord do? He does not hold the wrong against us. He still pities. He still asks for repentance.

I want to put a question to you. Does it not strike you as absurd that you human beings — God’s own handiwork, who took your souls from him and belong to God entirely — should be slaves to a different master, and worse, should wait on the tyrant instead of the king, on the wicked one instead of the good? In the name of truth, what man in his right mind walks away from the good and keeps company with evil? Who runs from God to live with demons? Who, when he could be a son of God, is glad to be a slave? Who, when he could be a citizen of heaven, chases after Erebus — when he could be farming Paradise and walking about in heaven and drinking from the living and undefiled spring, treading the air on the track of that shining cloud, like Elijah, and watching the rain that saves? But some men roll about like worms in swamps and mud — the streams of pleasure — and feed on delights that are useless and witless: pig-like men. For pigs, it is said, “take pleasure in mud” rather than clean water, and “go wild over rubbish,” as Democritus puts it.

No, then. Let us never be sold into slavery, and let us never turn into pigs. As true children of the light, let us look up and gaze into the light, so that the Lord does not expose us as illegitimate the way the sun exposes eagles. So let us repent, and move over from ignorance to knowledge, from foolishness to good sense, from having no self-control to self-control, from injustice to righteousness, from godlessness to God. It is a fine risk to desert to God’s side.

There are many other good things for the lovers of righteousness to enjoy — we are the ones chasing everlasting salvation — and among them the things God himself hints at when he speaks through Isaiah: “There is an inheritance for those who serve the Lord.” A fine inheritance, and one to love. Not gold, not silver, not clothing that the moth gets at, and not the things of earth, where the burglar tunnels in with his eye on wealth that lies close to the ground; but that treasure of salvation, which we must hurry toward by becoming lovers of the word. Our fine deeds set out from here along with us and fly beside us on truth’s wing. This is the inheritance that God’s everlasting covenant puts into our hands, supplying the everlasting gift. And this affectionate Father of ours, the real Father, never stops urging, warning, training, loving. He never stops saving either, and he gives the best advice: “Become righteous, says the Lord. You who are thirsty, go to the water; and all of you who have no money, come and buy and drink without money.”

He calls you to the bath, to salvation, to illumination, all but shouting it out loud: “I give you land and sea, child; I give you heaven, and I make you a gift of every living thing in them. Only thirst for your Father, child, and God will be shown to you at no charge. Truth is not sold over a counter.” He gives you what flies and what swims and what lives on the land. The Father made all of it for your grateful enjoyment. What the illegitimate son has to buy with money — the child of destruction, who has chosen to be a slave to mammon — God turns over to you as your own: to the true son, I mean, the one who loves the Father, for whose sake he is still at work, and to whom alone he makes this promise: “And the land shall not be sold outright.” It is not signed over to decay. “For all the land is mine” — and it is yours too, if you take God back.

So scripture, as you would expect, brings good news to those who have come to trust: “The Lord’s holy ones will inherit the glory of God and his power.” What glory, blessed man? Tell me. “What no eye has seen and no ear has heard, and what has never come up into a human heart; and they will be glad in the kingdom of their Lord forever. Amen.” You have, my friends, the divine promise of grace; you have heard the other side too, the threat of punishment. By these the Lord saves, training a person by fear and by grace. Why do we put it off? Why do we not dodge the punishment? Why do we not take the gift? Why do we not choose the better things — God instead of the wicked one — and prefer wisdom to idol-worship, and take life in exchange for death? “Look,” he says, “I have set death and life before your face.” The Lord is testing you, to have you choose life. He advises you as a father to obey God. “For if you listen to me,” he says, “and are willing, you will eat the good things of the land” — that is the grace that goes with obedience. “But if you do not obey me and are not willing, sword and fire will eat you up” — that is the sentence for disobedience. “For the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things.” The word of the Lord is the law of truth.

Would you like me to be your good adviser? Then listen, and I will lay it out if I can. You ought, my friends, when you are thinking about the Good itself, to bring forward the faith that is born in you — a witness trustworthy enough, and from your own household, one that plainly picks what is best — instead of busying yourselves with the question whether the best is worth chasing, and to work hard at the good. Look at it this way: if a man is going to get drunk, that is where doubt belongs; but you get drunk before you have looked into it. Whether to commit an outrage — there you make no inquiry at all; you commit it as fast as you can. The one thing you do investigate is whether God ought to be revered, and whether this wise God and Christ ought to be followed. That is what you judge to need deliberation and second thoughts — and you have never once worked out what suits God, whatever he is. Trust us at least as far as you trust drunkenness, so that you may come to your senses; trust us at least as far as you trust an outrage, so that you may live. But if you are willing to be persuaded once you have looked at the plain trustworthiness of the virtues, come: I will set out for you, and to spare, the case for the Word.

As for you — since your ancestral customs, which had you in hand first, no longer hold you off from the truth — hear now how the next thing stands. And do not let any shame at this name get hold of you first, shame “that does men great harm,” turning you aside from salvation.

Let us strip in the open, then, and compete honestly in truth’s stadium, with the holy Word as umpire and the Master of the universe presiding over the games. The prize set before us is no small one: it is immortality. So do not give a moment’s thought to what some rabble of market-loungers say about you — godless dancers in superstition’s chorus, shoved into the pit itself by stupidity and derangement, makers of idols and worshipers of stones. These are the men who have dared to make gods out of men: they registered Alexander of Macedon as the thirteenth god, “whom Babylon exposed as a corpse.”

So I admire the sophist from Chios — Theocritus was his name. After Alexander’s death, Theocritus was making fun, in front of his fellow citizens, of the empty opinions people held about the gods, and he said: “Men, keep your courage up as long as you can see the gods dying before the men do.”

And the man who worships the visible gods and this washed-up crowd of things that came into being, and attaches himself to them, is far more wretched than the demons themselves. For God is in no way at all unjust, as the demons are; he is as just as it is possible to be, and nothing is more like him than whichever one of us becomes as just as he can be.

fools, makers of stones and worshipers of them. Let your Phidias come, and Polyclitus, and Praxiteles, and Apelles too, and everyone who follows the workshop trades — men of earth, workers of earth. “For then,” some prophecy says, “affairs down here will turn out badly, when men put their trust in statues.” Let the lesser craftsmen come as well; I am not going to stop calling.

Not one of them has ever made an image that breathes, or softened soft flesh out of earth. Who melted the marrow? Who set the bones firm? Who stretched the sinews? Who blew the veins up full? Who poured the blood into them? Who spread the skin around? Where is the one among them who could make eyes that see? Who breathed in a soul? Who made a gift of righteousness? Who has promised immortality? Only the Maker of the universe, “the Father, the best of craftsmen,” shaped us — a living statue like this, a human being. But that Olympian Zeus of yours is an image of an image, badly out of tune with the truth, a dumb piece of work from Attic hands.

For the image of God is his Word — the true Son of the Mind, the divine Word, light that is the pattern of light — and the image of the Word is the true human being, the mind in a human being, who for that reason is said to have been made “according to the image” of God and “according to the likeness”: he is made like the divine Word by the good sense in his heart, and so he is rational. But statues in human shape are the earthly image of the visible, earth-born part of a man, a mold that will not last, and plainly wide of the truth.

This life of yours has come to seem to me nothing but a life full of madness, spent with so much earnestness on matter. Habit is made worse by empty opinion — habit, which gave you your first taste of slavery and of pointless fussing. And ignorance is the cause of lawless customs and cheating pretenses; ignorance, which supplied the human race with deadly dooms and hateful idols, and devised many shapes of demons, and stamped on everyone who follows it the stain of a long death.

So take the water of reason; wash yourselves, you who are defiled; sprinkle yourselves clean of custom with the drops of truth. You have to be clean to go up into heaven. You are a human being — that is the most ordinary thing about you: go looking for the one who made you. You are a son — that is what is most your own: recognize your Father.

But are you still staying on with your sins, stuck fast to your pleasures? Then to whom will the Lord say, “The kingdom of heaven is yours”? It is yours, if you are willing — you who have set your choice toward God; yours, if you are only willing to trust and to follow the short announcement. The people of Nineveh obeyed it, and instead of the capture they were expecting they got a fine rescue in exchange, by real repentance. “Then how am I to go up to heaven?” someone says. The Lord is the road: narrow, but out of heaven; narrow, but sending you up to heaven; narrow and looked down on here on earth, broad and worshiped in heaven.

Now, the man who has never heard of the Word has his ignorance as the excuse for going wrong. But the man who has had it put into his ears, and carries unbelief in his soul because he has settled on it — the wiser he looks, the more his own intelligence will harm him, because he has made his own good sense his accuser by not choosing the best part. A human being, after all, is made to be at home with God. We do not force the horse to plow or the bull to hunt; we take each animal to what it is made for. In just the same way we have laid hold of what belongs to a man, his special and distinguishing thing among the other animals, and we invite him — born as he is to look at heaven, a heavenly plant if ever there was one — to the knowledge of God, advising him to pack the one supply that will carry him through the ages: reverence for God.

Farm, we say, if you are a farmer; but know God while you farm. Sail, you who love the sea; but call on the heavenly Helmsman while you sail. Did the knowledge catch you on campaign? Then listen to the commander who signals what is right. So wake up, like men weighed down with stupor and drink; open your eyes a little and think what those stones you worship want with you, and what you throw away on matter in all this pointless expense. You are spending your money and your living on ignorance, the way you spend your life itself on death, and this is the only end you have found for your empty hope. You cannot even pity yourselves; you are not even fit to be persuaded by the people who feel for you in your wandering. You are slaves to a bad habit, hanging on it by your own choice down to your last breath, and you are being carried off into destruction — “because the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness more than the light” — when you could wipe away the things that stand in salvation’s way, pride and wealth and fear, saying the poet’s line over them:

Will you not throw these empty fantasies away, then, and say goodbye to habit itself, saying to vain opinion:

What do you take the Tychon Hermes to be, my friends, and the Hermes of Andocides, and the Hermes of Amyetus? Is it not plain to everyone that they are stones, exactly like Hermes himself? A halo is not a god and a rainbow is not a god; they are conditions of the air and the clouds. A day is not a god, and neither is a year, nor the time that is made up of them; and neither is the sun, nor the moon, by which each of those is marked off. So who in his right mind would take Audit and Punishment and Justice and Retribution for gods? The Furies are not gods, nor the Fates, nor Destiny — since Government is not a god either, nor Reputation, nor Wealth, whom painters even show as blind. And if you make gods of Modesty and Desire and Aphrodite, then let Disgrace and Impulse and Beauty and Sex follow along after them. So it can no longer be reasonable for you to reckon Sleep and Death “twin gods”; they are things that happen to living creatures naturally. Nor can you justly call Doom or Destiny or the Fates goddesses. If Strife and Battle are not gods, neither are Ares and Enyo. And further: if lightning and thunderbolts and rainstorms are not gods, how can fire and water be gods? How can shooting stars and comets be, which come about through a condition of the air? Whoever calls Fortune a god may as well call Action a god too.

If, then, not one of these is held to be a god, and neither are those handmade, senseless moldings, and yet some providence of divine power is plainly at work around us, nothing is left but to admit this: that the only one who really is, and really subsists, is the God who alone truly exists. You senseless people are like men who have drunk mandrake or some other drug. May God grant that you sober up from this sleep one day and understand God, and stop imagining that gold or stone or a tree or an action or a passion or a disease or fear is a god. For there truly are “thrice ten thousand spirits on the nourishing earth” — not immortal ones, and not exactly mortal either, since they have no share in sensation and so can have no share in death; but masters of men made of stone and wood, insulting life and breaking faith with it through the force of habit.

“The earth is the Lord’s,” it says, “and everything that fills it.” So how do you dare to live in luxury on what belongs to the Lord and ignore the Master? “Leave my land,” the Lord will say to you. “Do not touch the water I send up. Do not take a share of the crops I farm.” Pay God back for your keep, man. Recognize your Master. You are God’s own handiwork. How could what belongs to him rightly become somebody else’s? What is made another’s is stripped of the properties that were its own, and so it is stripped of truth as well.

Are you not, in a way, like Niobe — or, to put it to you more in the manner of the mysteries, like the Hebrew woman the ancients called Lot’s — turning into something that cannot feel? We have it that this woman was turned to stone for loving Sodom; and the godless, the men who turn toward irreverence, hard-hearted and stupid, are the men of Sodom. Take these words as spoken to you from God. Do not suppose that stones and logs and birds and snakes are sacred and human beings are not. It is very much the other way around: take human beings to be the truly sacred things, and take animals and stones for exactly what they are.

For there are wretched and miserable people who think God shouts through a raven or a jackdaw and says nothing through a human being. They have honored the raven as God’s messenger, and God’s man they hunt down. He does not croak and he does not chatter; he speaks — and, to my grief, while he is teaching them in words and out of love for them, they set about cutting his throat inhumanly, while he is calling them to righteousness. They neither wait for the grace that comes from above nor turn aside from the punishment. They do not trust God and they do not learn his power. His love for people cannot be told; his hatred of evil cannot be contained. His anger feeds the punishment for sin; his love for people does good where there is repentance. And the most pitiable thing of all is to be robbed of the help that comes from God.

Blindness of the eyes and deafness of the hearing are more painful than the rest of the wicked one’s grabbings: the one has robbed men of the sight of heaven, the other has stripped them of the divine teaching. But you, maimed as regards the truth, blind in mind and deaf in understanding, feel no pain and no anger. You have never wanted to see heaven and the maker of heaven; you have never gone looking to hear the Maker and Father of all things and learn from him, joining your choice to salvation. For nothing stands in the way of a man who is hurrying toward the knowledge of God — not lack of schooling, not poverty, not obscurity, not owning nothing. And nobody, sword in hand, prays to trade away the wisdom that is really true — not for bronze, and not for iron either. For this above all has been well said: the good man brings rescue everywhere. A man who is jealous for what is right, being in love with the One who needs nothing, needs little himself; he has stored up his happiness nowhere but in God himself, where there is no moth, no burglar, no pirate, but the everlasting Giver of good things.

So it is fair enough that you have been compared to those snakes whose ears are shut against the charmers. “Their rage,” scripture says, “is like a snake’s, like a deaf adder that stops up its ears and will not listen to the voice of the charmers.” But you — let the charm be sung over your wildness. Take in this gentle word of ours and spit out the deadly poison, so that it may be granted you to strip off corruption as far as you can, the way they strip off old age. Listen to me and do not plug your ears; do not block up the passages of hearing, but take what is said into your mind. The medicine of immortality is a fine thing. Stop, at last, dragging yourselves along on your bellies. “For the enemies of the Lord shall lick the dust,” it says. Lift your heads off the ground into the upper air; look up to heaven; be amazed; stop lying in wait for the heel of the righteous and getting in the way of “the road of truth.” Be wise and do no harm. Perhaps the Lord will make you a gift of the wing of simplicity — he has decided to give wings to the earth-born — so that you may leave your holes and make your home in the heavens.

Only let us repent with a whole heart, so that with a whole heart we may be able to hold God. “Hope in him, every gathering of the people,” it says; “pour out all your hearts before him.” He is speaking to those who have emptied themselves of wickedness: he pities them and fills them with righteousness. Trust, man, one who is man and God. Trust, man, the one who suffered and is worshiped. You who are slaves, trust the living God, the one who was dead. All you human beings, trust the only God of all human beings. Trust, and take salvation as your wages. “Seek God, and your soul will live.” The man who seeks God is busy about his own salvation. Have you found God? Then you have life. So let us seek, in order that we may also live. The wages of the finding are life with God. “Let all who seek you be glad and rejoice in you, and let them say always: God be magnified.”

A fine hymn to God is a deathless human being, built up in righteousness, with the sayings of truth cut into him. Where else but in a sober soul should righteousness be written? Where love? Where modesty? Where gentleness? People who have had these divine writings sealed into the soul ought, I think, to reckon wisdom a fine starting-gate, whatever part of life they turn to, and to reckon that same wisdom a harbor of salvation where no wave comes. It is wisdom that has made good fathers to their children out of men who ran to the Father, and good sons to their parents out of men who understood the Son, and good husbands to their wives out of men who remember the Bridegroom, and good masters to their household slaves out of men who have been ransomed from the ultimate slavery.

The beasts are happier than men caught in their error! They graze on ignorance, as you do, but they do not counterfeit the truth. There are no breeds of flatterers among them. Fish are not superstitious; birds do not worship idols; they are struck with wonder at one thing only, the sky, since they cannot know God, having been judged unworthy of reason. So are you not ashamed of having made yourselves less rational than the creatures without reason — you who have worn away so many stages of life in godlessness? You were boys, then lads, then young men, then men, and never once good. If you have any respect for old age, come to your senses now that you are at the sunset of life; get to know God even at the end of life, so that the end of your life may take up the beginning of salvation. You grew old toward superstition; come young to reverence for God. God enrolls children who have done no harm.

So let the Athenian follow Solon’s laws, and the Argive follow Phoroneus’s, and the Spartan Lycurgus’s. But if you enroll yourself as God’s, heaven is your country and God is your lawgiver. And what are the laws? “You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not molest children. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony. You shall love the Lord your God.” And there are the fillings-out of these as well, eloquent laws and holy words written on the hearts themselves: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and “To the man who strikes you on the jaw, offer the other one as well,” and “You shall not crave, for by craving alone you have committed adultery.” How much better it is for people, right from the start, not even to want to crave what they should not, than to get what they crave!

But you cannot hold out under the harshness of salvation. It is like food: we take pleasure in sweet things and prefer them for the smoothness of the pleasure, while the bitter things that scrape the senses are what cure us and make us well; the harshness of the medicines braces up men with weak stomachs. In the same way habit is pleasant and tickles — but habit pushes you into the pit, and truth leads you up to heaven. Truth is “rough” at first, “but a good nurse of the young.” It is a dignified thing in the women’s quarters and a sober thing in the council of elders. It is not hard to get at and not impossible to lay hold of; it lives extremely close by, as the all-wise Moses says in a riddle: it makes its home in three parts of us, “in the hands and the mouth and the heart.” That is a true token of the truth, which is filled out in everyone by these three things: intention, action, and speech.

And do not be afraid of this either — that the many pleasing things that rise up before you will take you away from wisdom. You will step over the nonsense of habit willingly, by yourself, the way boys who have become men throw their toys away.

For with unsurpassable speed, and with a goodwill that is easy to approach, the divine power shone on the earth and filled the whole of it with the seed of salvation. The Lord would never have finished so great a work in so short a time without divine care — despised in appearance, worshiped in fact; the cleanser, the savior, the gentle one; the divine Word, the God who is truly most plainly seen, the one made equal to the Master of all, because he was his Son, and “the Word was in God.” He was not disbelieved when he was first announced, and he was not unrecognized when he took up the mask of a man and molded himself in flesh and played out the saving drama of humanity; for he was a true competitor, and a fellow competitor with the thing God had formed. Handed on to all people at the greatest speed, having risen from his Father’s own will faster than the sun, he made God shine on us with the utmost ease. Where he was from and who he was, he showed by what he taught and displayed: the truce-bearer, the reconciler, our Savior, the Word, a spring that makes alive, a spring of peace, poured out over the whole face of the earth — through whom, so to speak, the universe has already become a sea of good things.