Sail Past the Song

So let us run from custom — run from it as we would from a dangerous headland, or the threat of Charybdis, or the Sirens out of the stories. Custom chokes a person. It turns him away from truth. It leads him away from life. Custom is a snare, a chasm, a pit, an evil winnowing basket. [a]

Let us run from it, shipmates; let us run from this wave. It belches fire. There is a wicked island out there, heaped with bones and corpses, and on it sings a pretty little prostitute, Pleasure, delighting in music that pleases the crowd.

She praises you, sailor. She calls you much-sung. The whore is helping herself to the glory of the Greeks. Leave her to graze on the dead. A heavenly wind is helping you. Sail past Pleasure — she is leading you on.

Sail past the song; it deals death. Only be willing, and you have already beaten destruction. Bound to the wood, you will be loosed from every kind of decay. The Word of God will be your helmsman, and the Holy Spirit will bring you to anchor in the harbors of heaven. Then you will look on my God, and be initiated into those holy mysteries, and enjoy what is hidden away in heaven and kept for me — things “no ear has heard, and that have not come up into anyone’s heart.”

so said a man raving among idols, drunk on ignorance neat. I would pity him for carrying on like a drunk; and mad as he is, I would call him to a salvation that is sober — for the Lord welcomes a sinner’s repentance and not his death.

Come here, madman — not propped on a thyrsus, not wreathed with ivy. Throw off the headband. Throw off the fawnskin. Come to your senses. I will show you the Word, and the mysteries of the Word, and I will tell them in your own imagery. Here is a mountain that God loves. It is not the setting of tragedies, the way Cithaeron is; it is given over to the dramas of truth. It is a sober mountain, shaded with pure woods. And the ones who hold their revels on it are not the sisters of Semele the thunderstruck, the maenads, initiated into an unholy carving of flesh, but the daughters of God, the beautiful lambs, who announce the holy rites of the Word and gather a chorus that is sober.

The chorus is the righteous. The song is a hymn to the King of all. The girls play the strings, the angels give glory, the prophets speak, the sound of music goes out. They chase the dancing band at a run. Those who have been called are hurrying, longing to receive the Father.

Come to me, old man, you too. Leave Thebes. Throw away your fortune-telling and your Bacchic revelry, and let yourself be led by the hand to truth. Look — I am giving you the wood to lean on. Hurry, Tiresias. Believe, and you will see. Christ shines out brighter than the sun, and through him the eyes of the blind look up again. Night will run from you, fire will be afraid, death will be gone. You will see the heavens, old man — you who cannot see Thebes.

Oh, the truly holy mysteries! Oh, the light with nothing in it to stain! I am led by torchlight to gaze on the heavens and on God. I become holy as I am initiated. The Lord is the one who shows the holy things: he seals the initiate as he brings him into the light, and he places the one who has believed in the Father’s hands, to be kept for all ages. These are the revels of my mysteries. If you want, be initiated yourself — and you will dance with the angels around the God who was never made, who cannot be destroyed, the only God who truly is, while the Word of God sings the hymn along with us.

This Jesus is eternal, the one great high priest of the one God who is the same and is Father. He prays for people, and he calls out to them:

“Hear me, you countless tribes — or rather, all of you who have reason, barbarians and Greeks alike. I am calling the whole human race; I am their maker, by the Father’s will. Come to me, and be drawn up in your places under one God and the one Word of God. Do not settle for having reason merely as your advantage over the animals that have none. Of everything mortal, it is to you alone that I grant the harvest of immortality. For I want to — I want to give you a share in this grace as well, supplying the gift whole and entire: freedom from decay. And I give you the Word, the knowledge of God. I give you myself, complete.

“This is what I am. This is what God wants. This is concord. This is the Father’s harmony. This is Son. This is Christ. This is the Word of God, the arm of the Lord, the power of all things, the will of the Father. You who have been images since long ago — though not all of you look like the original — I want to set you straight again by the pattern, so that you may become like me as well. I will rub you with the oil of faith, and by it you throw off decay; and I will show you the naked shape of righteousness, and by it you climb to God.

“Come to me, all of you who are worn out and weighed down, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke on you and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is kind and my burden is light.”

Let us hurry. Let us run — we who are the Word’s statues, dear to God and shaped like him. Let us hurry, let us run, let us take up his yoke, let us harness ourselves to a life beyond decay, let us love Christ, the good charioteer of humanity. He led the colt in harness alongside the old one; and having yoked humanity together as his team of two, he drives the chariot straight toward never dying. He is hurrying to God, to finish out in the open what he hinted at before: he drove into Jerusalem then, and now he is driving into the heavens. The finest sight there is, as far as the Father is concerned, is an eternal Son coming in with the victory.

So let us set our ambition on what is good and become people dear to God, and let us get for ourselves the greatest of all good things — God, and life. The Word is our helper. Let us take heart in him, and let no longing for silver and gold, or for a great name, ever come over us as strong as our longing for the Word of truth himself. It will not — it simply will not — please God himself if we treat what is worth the most as worth the least, and prefer instead the blatant outrages of ignorance and stupidity and laziness and idol-worship, and irreverence at its very worst.

The philosophers’ students are not off the mark when they judge that everything the senseless do is unholy and irreverent; and when they sketch ignorance itself as a form of madness, they are saying outright that most people are insane. So reason leaves no room to doubt which of the two is better, being sane or being mad. We must grip the truth in our teeth and follow God with all our strength, in our right minds, and count everything as his — which is what it is. And since we have learned that we ourselves are the finest thing he owns, let us hand ourselves over to God, loving the Lord God and treating that as our work for the whole of life. If “what belongs to friends is shared,” and a human being is dear to God — a friend of God, in fact, with the Word standing between — then everything becomes a person’s own, because everything is God’s, and everything belongs to both friends together, God and the human being.

So it is time for us to say that only the person who reveres God — the Christian — is rich, and sober-minded, and well-born; and that in this way he is an image of God with the likeness as well. It is time to say it and to believe it: that through Christ Jesus he has become “righteous and holy with understanding,” and to that extent is already like God too. The prophet does not keep this grace hidden, at any rate, when he says, “I said, you are gods, and sons of the Most High, all of you.” It is us — us — that he has adopted, and he wants to be called the Father of us alone, not of those who refuse to obey. And this is roughly how things stand with us, the attendants of Christ:

The whole life of people who have come to know Christ is good.

Enough of words, I think — though love for people carried me on further than I meant, pouring out whatever I had from God, since I was calling you to the greatest of all good things, salvation. When the subject is the life that has no stopping place anywhere at all, not even words are willing to stop showing the holy things. One thing is still left to you as the end of it: to choose what is to your profit — judgment, or grace. For my part I do not think there is even room to doubt which of the two is better; and it is not permitted to set life beside destruction and compare them.