An Altar of Holy Souls

Are we not right, and simply telling the truth, when we refuse to shut up in one place the one who cannot be shut up anywhere, and refuse to lock inside temples made by hand the one who holds all things? What work of builders and stonecutters and manual craft can be holy? Are those people not nearer the mark who think that the air, and the space that surrounds us — or rather the whole world and the universe — are what suit the excellence of God? [a]

It would be absurd, as the philosophers themselves say, for a man, who is God’s plaything, to manufacture God, and for God to end up the plaything of a craft. What a thing is made of is what it is: what is made of ivory is ivory, and what is made of gold is gold. Now the images and temples that craftsmen put up are made of lifeless matter, so they too are lifeless, material and unhallowed; and if you bring the craft to perfection, they only share the more in the coarseness of the workshop. Works of craft, then, cannot be sacred and divine.

And what could be put in a place, when there is nothing that is not in a place already? For everything is somewhere. A thing that is put in a place was previously not in a place, and something else put it there. So if God is put in a place by men, then there was a time when he was not in a place, and therefore did not exist at all. What is not in a place does not exist, since whatever does not exist is not anywhere. And what exists cannot be put in place by what does not exist; nor by some other existing thing, because that thing would be a being in its own right. It follows that he would have to do it to himself. And how can anything generate itself? How can what exists set itself in place with respect to its own being? If he was formerly not in a place, did he then put himself in one? But he was not in existence, and what does not exist is not in a place. And granting that he has now been put in a place, how can he afterwards make himself what he was before?

And how could the one to whom all existing things belong need anything at all? If God had a human shape, he would need food and covering and a house just as a man does, and everything else that goes with them. Beings alike in shape and in feelings will want the same upkeep. Now if the word “sacred” has two uses, naming both God himself and the building raised in his honor, then surely we are right to call the church holy: made through knowledge for the honor of God, sacred to God, of great worth, not put together by a craftsman’s skill nor dressed up by the hand of a fraud, but shaped into a temple by the will of God. For here I am not calling the building the church, but the gathering of the chosen. This is the better temple for receiving the greatness of God’s dignity.

For the living creature that is of high worth is made sacred by the one who is worth everything, or rather who has no equivalent at all, because his holiness so far surpasses it. And this is the one who truly knows: a man of great worth, honored by God, in whom God is enshrined — which is to say, in whom the knowledge of God is set apart as holy. Here too we shall find the divine likeness and the holy image, in the righteous soul, when it is blessed in being made clean and in doing blessed deeds. And here we shall find both what has already been put in place and what is being put in place: the first in those who already know, the second in those who are able to come to know, though not yet fit to receive the knowledge of God. For everyone who is going to believe is already a believer in God’s sight, and already stands set up in his honor — an image, with virtue in it, dedicated to God.

So God is not shut up in a place, and is never represented in the shape of a living creature; and in the same way he has no feelings like ours and no wants like a creature’s, so as to desire a sacrifice out of hunger, by way of food. Everything that is subject to such feelings is mortal. And there is no use carrying food to someone who is not fed. The comic poet Pherecrates, in his Deserters, has some fun with this, and puts the complaint about men’s handling of the sacred rites into the mouths of the gods themselves: [h]

Eubulus, another comic poet, writes this about sacrifices:

And in his Semele he brings Dionysus on stage to argue the point:

And Menander writes:

For do not even the animals keep clear of the smell of a whole burnt offering? And if that smell really is the perquisite of the Greek gods, ought they not first to make gods of their cooks, who are honored with exactly the same happiness — and to worship the chimney itself, which is closer still to the precious smell? Hesiod says that Zeus, cheated by Prometheus over the dividing of the meat, got the white bones of an ox hidden by clever art inside glistening fat:

They will certainly not say that God is worn down by the craving that comes of want, and so is fed. So they will represent him as fed without craving — like a plant, or like the animals that burrow, which they say grow without harm, nourished either by the thickness of the air or by the vapors given off from their own bodies. But if God, needing nothing, is on their account nourished all the same, what need has he of food when he lacks nothing? And if by nature he needs nothing, yet delights in being honored, then it is not without reason that we honor God in prayer. That is the best and holiest sacrifice, and we bring it with righteousness, presenting it as an offering to the most righteous Word, through whom we receive knowledge, giving glory through him for what we have learned.

The altar we have here, then, the earthly one, is the gathering of those who give themselves to prayer, having, as it were, one voice in common and one mind. Now if food taken in through the nostrils is more divine than food taken in through the mouth, it still implies breathing. What then do they say about God? Does he breathe out, like the race of oak trees? Or does he only breathe in, the way water creatures do, by opening their gills? Or does he breathe all over, like insects, squeezing the segments of their bodies by means of their wings? Nobody in his right mind will liken God to any of these. The creatures that breathe by expanding the lung toward the chest draw the air in. So if they assign God inner organs and arteries and veins and sinews and parts, they will have made him no different from a man.

But “breathing together” is a word that properly belongs to the church. For the church’s sacrifice is the word rising like incense from holy souls, with the sacrifice and the whole mind laid open to God at the same time. The very ancient altar on Delos was celebrated as holy; it alone was undefiled by slaughter and death, and they say Pythagoras was willing to approach it. Then will they not believe us when we say that the righteous soul is the truly sacred altar, and that the incense rising from it is holy prayer? For my part I believe sacrifices were invented by men as a pretext for eating meat. Anyone who wanted meat could have had it without that idolatry.

The sacrifices of the Law are figures for the reverence we practice. The turtledove and the pigeon offered for sins show that God accepts the cleansing of the unreasoning part of the soul. But if one of the righteous does not weigh his soul down by eating meat, he has the advantage of a reasonable ground for it — not the dream of Pythagoras and his followers about souls passing from body to body. Xenocrates, in his separate treatment of food that comes from animals, and Polemon in his work On Life According to Nature, plainly seem to say that meat is unwholesome, since it has already been worked up and made like the souls of the unreasoning creatures.

In the same way the Jews in particular keep away from pork, on the ground that the animal is unclean, since more than any other it roots up and ruins what grows in the ground. And if they say the animals were handed over to men — we agree with them — still it was not entirely for food, and not every animal, but only the ones that do no work. So the comic poet Plato puts it well in his play The Feasts:

And Aesop put it well: Pigs squeal so loudly because, when they are dragged off, they know they are good for nothing but sacrifice. That is also why Cleanthes says pigs have a soul in place of salt, so that their flesh will not go rotten. Some, then, eat them because they are useless, others because they destroy the crops. And others will not eat them at all, because the animal is so strongly given to lust.

So the Law does not sacrifice the goat, except in the single case of sending sins away — since pleasure is the mother city of vice. It is to the point, too, that eating goat meat is said to bring on epilepsy. And they say that pork produces the greatest gain in bulk, so it is useful to men who train the body, but not to men who give themselves to the growth of the soul, because of the dullness that comes of eating meat. Perhaps one who truly knows will also keep away from meat, for the sake of training, and so that his flesh will not run wild with lust. Androcydes says, Wine and gorging on meat make the body strong, but the soul more sluggish. So for the sake of clear understanding such food is to be refused.

That is also why the Egyptians, in the purifications they practice, do not allow their priests to feed on meat. They use poultry instead, as the lightest food, and they do not touch fish — partly on account of certain stories, but chiefly because such food makes the flesh flabby. Land animals and birds breathe the same air as the breath of life in us, having a life principle akin to the air. But fish, they say, do not breathe this air; they breathe the air that was mixed into the water at the very moment of its first making, along with the rest of the elements — which is also a sign that matter endures.

So the sacrifices we ought to offer God are not the costly ones but the ones he loves. And that compounded incense named in the Law is the incense made of many tongues and voices in prayer — or rather of different nations and different natures, made ready by the gift given in God’s arrangement for “the unity of the faith,” and brought together in praise, with a pure mind and just and upright conduct, out of holy works and righteous prayer. For, as poetry puts it elegantly:

And that even when the men happen to be tyrants and bandits. But we say that fire makes holy not flesh but sinful souls — meaning not the common all-devouring fire, but the fire of wisdom, which soaks through the soul as it passes through the fire.