True Worship and the Two Ways

We have finished what we set out to do, helped by the teaching of the Divine Spirit and by the truth itself. The work of stating that truth and explaining it was laid on me by conscience and by faith, and by our Lord himself, without whom nothing can be known or set out clearly. I come now to the chief and greatest part of this work: to teach in what way, and with what sacrifice, God is to be worshipped. That is what a human being is for. The sum of everything stands in that one thing, and the whole course of a happy life, since we were shaped and given the breath of life for this reason — not so that we might gaze at the sky and the sun, as Anaxagoras thought, but so that with a pure and undamaged mind we might worship the one who made the sun and the sky. [a]

In the earlier books I defended the truth as far as my modest ability allowed; but nothing brings it into the light so well as the manner of worship itself. That sacred and surpassing majesty asks nothing of a person beyond innocence alone, and anyone who has brought God that has sacrificed with piety and religion enough. But men neglect justice. They are filthy with crimes and outrages of every kind, and still they think themselves religious if they have stained the temples and the altars with the blood of victims, if they have soaked the hearths with a flood of fragrant old wine. They lay on sacred feasts and choice banquets besides, as though they were serving guests who would taste something of them. Whatever is rarely seen, whatever is costly in workmanship or in scent — that is what they decide their gods will like. They judge it not from anything they know of the gods’ nature, since they know nothing of it, but from their own appetites; and it never occurs to them that God has no need of the earth’s supplies.

They know nothing but the earth, and they measure good and bad by the body’s sensation and pleasure alone. And as they judge religion by the pleasure it gives, so they arrange every other act of their lives. Having turned away once and for all from looking at the sky, and having made that heavenly faculty a slave to the body, they give their cravings free rein, as though they were going to carry their pleasure away with them — which is why they hurry to enjoy it at every moment. Yet the soul ought to make use of the body’s service, not the body of the soul’s.

These same men judge riches the greatest good. If they cannot get riches by honest practices, they set about getting them by dishonest ones: they cheat, they seize by force, they plunder, they lie in ambush, they swear to lies. In short, they keep no scruple and no restraint about anything, so long as they can glitter with gold and be conspicuous in silver plate, in jewels, and in clothes, spend a fortune on their greedy appetite, and always walk out with a train of slaves behind them through a crowd shoved out of the way. Handed over like that to the service of pleasures, they put out the strength and vigor of the mind; and just when they think themselves most alive, they are rushing headlong toward death. For, as we showed in Book 2, the soul has to do with heaven and the body with the earth. Those who neglect the goods of the soul and hunt the goods of the body have taken up with darkness and death, which belong to the earth and the body, since life and light come from heaven. And people who lack that light, being in the body’s service, are a long way from understanding anything divine. The same blindness weighs these wretched men down at every point: not knowing who the true God is, they do not know what true worship is either.

So they sacrifice choice fat animals to God, as though he were hungry; they pour out wine to him, as though he were thirsty; they light lamps for him, as though he were in the dark. If they could guess, or form any idea in their minds, of what those heavenly goods are — goods whose greatness we cannot picture while we are still wrapped in an earthly body — they would see at once how absurd they are with their empty routines. Or if they would only look at that heavenly light we call the sun, they would see straight away that God has no need of their candles, since he himself has given a light so clear and so bright for people to use. [g]

Consider: in so small a disk — which, because of its distance, looks no wider across than a human head — there is still such brilliance that a mortal eye cannot bear it, and if you turned your eye on it even briefly a mist and a darkness would spread over your blurred sight. Then what light, I ask you, what brightness must there be in God, with whom there is no night? He has tuned this very light so carefully that it harms no living creature either by too much brightness or by fierce heat, and he gave it just as much of both as mortal bodies could bear and the ripening of the crops requires. Is a man in his right mind, then, who offers the light of candles and torches to the one who is the maker and giver of light? The light God wants from us is of another kind — and not a light that comes with smoke, but, as the poet says, clear and bright. I mean the light of the mind, which is why the poets call us phōtes. No one can produce that light unless he has come to know God.

But their gods, being of the earth, need lamps so as not to sit in the dark; and their worshippers, having no taste for anything of heaven, are called back down to the earth by the very rites they are devoted to. On earth a light is needed, because the earth is dark by its own make and nature. So they credit their gods not with a heavenly way of perceiving things but with a human one, and on that account they believe the gods need and enjoy the same things we do — we who need food when we are hungry, drink when we are thirsty, a garment when we are cold, and a light to see by when the sun has gone.

Nothing proves so plainly that those gods, having once been alive, are dead, as their worship itself, which is of the earth from beginning to end. What can there be of heaven in the shedding of animals’ blood, with which they stain their altars? — unless perhaps they imagine the gods eat what men will not touch. And whoever has served them that fodder, though he be a murderer, an adulterer, a sorcerer, or the killer of his own father, will be happy and prosperous. He is the one they love, the one they defend, the one to whom they grant everything he asks for. Persius is right, then, to make fun of superstitions of this kind in his own manner:

He saw clearly that appeasing the majesty of heaven takes no meat, but a clean mind and an upright spirit, and a heart, as he puts it himself, generous with an inborn love of honor. This is the religion of heaven: not one put together out of things that rot, but out of the virtues of the soul, which has its origin in heaven. This is true worship, in which the worshipper’s own mind presents itself to God as an offering that has not been defiled. How this is to be come by, and how it is to be offered, the argument of this book will show; for nothing can be so fine a thing, or so fitting for a human being, as training people in righteousness.

In Cicero’s Hortensius, Catulus, while ranking philosophy above everything else, says he would rather have one short treatise on duty than a long speech on behalf of Cornelius the troublemaker. Plainly this is to be taken not as the opinion of Catulus, who perhaps never said it, but as Cicero’s, who wrote it. I take it he wrote it to recommend the books he was about to write On Duties — the very books in which he declares that nothing in the whole range of philosophy is better or more useful than laying down rules for living. But if men who do not know the truth do this, how much more should we do it, who are able to give true rules, since God has taught us and given us light? We will not teach, however, as though we were handing out the first elements of virtue, which would be a task with no end, but as though we had taken on the instruction of a man who by their standards is already complete. Their own rules stand, the ones they are used to giving correctly with an eye to upright conduct; to those we will add what they did not know, the things that finish and complete the righteousness they do not have. But I will leave out what we hold in common with them, so that I do not look like a borrower from men whose mistakes I have set out to convict and expose.

There are two ways, Emperor Constantine, along which human life must travel: the one that leads up to heaven and the one that sinks down to the world below. Poets have brought them into their poems and philosophers into their arguments. The philosophers have made the one belong to the virtues and the other to the vices. The way of the virtues, they say, is steep and rough at the entrance; but if a man overcomes the difficulty and climbs to the top, he then has level going, a bright and pleasant plain, and enjoys the rich and delightful fruits of his labor. Those whom the hardness of the first approach has frightened off slide aside into the way of the vices, which at its entrance looks pleasant and far more traveled. A little further along, though, the look of pleasantness is taken away; the road turns steep, rough with stones here, overgrown with thorns there, cut across by deep water or torn up by torrents, so that the travelers are in trouble at every step — hesitating, sliding, falling. All of this is set out to show that taking up the virtues costs enormous labor, but that once they are won the profits are the greatest there are, solid pleasures that cannot spoil; while the vices catch men’s minds with certain natural flatteries and lead them off, prisoners of an empty look of pleasure, into bitter griefs and miseries. It is an entirely sensible discussion — if only they had known the shapes and the limits of the virtues themselves. But they had not learned what the virtues are, or what reward God has waiting for them. That is what we will show in these two books. [m]

These men, being either ignorant or unsure that human souls are immortal, measured both virtues and vices by earthly honors or earthly punishments. So their whole discussion of the two ways comes down to self-restraint and self-indulgence. The course of a human life, they say, is shaped like the letter Y, because every man, when he has reached the threshold of early manhood and come to the place —

— stands in doubt and hesitates, not knowing which side he had better turn to. If he meets a guide who can steer him, while he wavers, toward better things — that is, if he takes up philosophy or public speaking, or some honorable art that may bring him out well, none of which happens without hard work — then, they say, he will lead a life of honor and plenty. But if he does not meet a teacher of self-restraint, he falls into the road on the left hand, which puts on the appearance of the better one; that is, he gives himself up to idleness, laziness, and indulgence, which seem pleasant for a while to a man who does not know what the true goods are, but afterwards, having lost his standing and his property, he will live in complete wretchedness and disgrace. So they made the ends of those ways come out at the body, and at this life we live on earth. The poets perhaps did better, in putting this forked road down in the world below; but they went wrong in offering the two ways to the dead. Both, then, spoke truly, and both spoke wrongly: the ways themselves should have been referred to life, and their ends to death. We speak better and more truly, who say that the two ways belong to heaven and to the world below, since immortality is promised to the righteous and everlasting punishment is threatened to the unrighteous.

I will explain how these ways either lift a man to heaven or push him down below, and I will set out what the virtues are that the philosophers knew nothing of; then I will show what their rewards are, and what the vices are, and what their punishments. Perhaps someone expects me to speak of vices and virtues separately. But when we discuss what is good or bad, the opposite of it is understood along with it. Bring in the virtues and the vices leave of their own accord; take away the vices and the virtues come in of themselves. The nature of good things and bad is fixed in this way: they always oppose each other and drive each other out. So it comes about that the vices cannot be got rid of without the virtues, and the virtues cannot be brought in without getting rid of the vices.

We put these ways forward, then, in a very different manner from the philosophers’ usual one. First of all, because we say that a guide is set over each road, and in both cases an immortal guide: the one who presides over the virtues and the good qualities is held in honor, and the one who presides over the vices and the evils is condemned. They set a guide only on the right-hand road, and not one guide, and not a lasting one, since any teacher of a good art will do for them — anyone who can call men back from laziness and teach them restraint. And they picture nobody entering that road except boys and young men, for the reason that the arts are learned at those ages. We, on the other hand, lead people of both sexes, of every age and every nation, into this heavenly road, because God, who is the guide of that way, refuses immortality to no human being.

The shape of the ways themselves is not what they supposed, either. What need is there of a letter Y in matters that are different from each other and opposed? The better road is turned toward the rising of the sun, the worse toward its setting: for the man who follows truth and righteousness will receive the reward of immortality and enjoy unending light, while the man who is coaxed by that evil guide into preferring vices to virtues and lies to truth must be carried off to the setting of the sun and into the dark. I will describe each of them, then, and point out what belongs to each and how each behaves.