The Altar in the Heart

I come now to the pleasure that is taken in through touch, a sense that belongs to the whole body. But what I think I ought to speak about is not ornament or clothing; it is lust alone, which needs holding in check most of all, because it does the most harm. When God had worked out the plan of two sexes, he gave them this: that they should want each other and take delight in coming together. So he mixed a burning desire into the bodies of every living thing, so that they would rush at these urges as greedily as possible, and by that means the kinds of creatures could be propagated and multiplied. In a human being this desire and appetite is found stronger and sharper than in the rest — either because he wanted the number of people to be greater, or because he gave virtue to human beings alone, so that there might be praise and glory in reining pleasure in and holding oneself back. [a]

So that adversary of ours knows how great the force of this desire is — some have preferred to call it a necessity — and he shifts it off what is right and good and onto what is evil and crooked. He sends in forbidden longings, so that men defile what belongs to someone else, when they are free to have their own without any offense at all. He throws exciting shapes in front of the eyes, hands out kindling, and serves the vices their food; then, deep inside the body, he stirs and shakes every goad, and rouses and inflames that natural heat, until he has a man netted and tangled and taken in. And so that there should be no one left who kept his hands off another man’s property out of fear of the penalty, he set up brothels as well, and put the modesty of unhappy women on public sale, so as to make a mockery both of the men who do it and of the women who have to submit to it.

With these obscenities he has sunk souls that were born for holiness into what might as well be a whirlpool of sewage; he has put out shame and wrecked chastity. The same one has mixed males with males, and contrived unspeakable couplings against nature and against God’s own arrangement; that is how he has steeped men in it and armed them for every kind of wickedness. For what can be sacred to men who lay an age that is weak and in need of protection underneath their own lust, to be ravaged and fouled? The thing cannot be told in words that match the size of the crime. I can call such men nothing but godless, and murderers of their own kin: the sex God gave them is not enough for them, unless they also make profane and insolent sport of their own. And yet among them this counts as a light matter, and almost as respectable.

What am I to say about the men who practice not an abominable lust but rather a madness? It disgusts me to say it. But what are we to think will become of men whom it does not disgust to do it? And still it has to be said, because it happens. I am speaking of those whose foulest lust and accursed frenzy does not spare even the head. With what words, with what indignation, am I to go after so great an outrage? The size of the crime beats anything the tongue can do.

So, since lust turns out work like this and marks out deeds like these, we have to arm ourselves against it with the greatest virtue there is. Whoever cannot bridle those urges should keep them inside the limits laid down for a lawful marriage bed, so that he gets the thing he wants so badly and still does not fall into sin. What is it these ruined men are after? Pleasure follows on honorable acts. If it is pleasure itself they want, they are allowed to enjoy it in a right and lawful way.

And if some necessity forbids even that, then the greatest virtue of all will have to be brought in, so that self-control fights back against desire. God has commanded us to keep away not only from bodies that belong to someone else and may not be touched, but from public and common bodies as well; and he teaches us that when two bodies have been joined together they make one body. So a man who has dipped himself in filth must come out smeared with it. The body can be washed quickly. But the mind, once stained by contact with an unchaste body, cannot be cleansed of the muck that has stuck to it except by a long time and many good works.

Each man ought to set it before himself, then, that the joining of the two sexes was given to living creatures for the sake of begetting, and that this is the law laid on these urges: that they provide a next generation. Just as God gave us eyes not so that we could stare and take pleasure, but so that we could see, for the sake of the acts that living requires, so we received the generative part of the body — as the very name shows — for no other purpose than the producing of children. This divine law is to be obeyed with the utmost devotion. Let everyone who is going to call himself a student of God be so trained in character that he can give himself orders. For those who indulge their pleasures, who give in to their lust, hand their soul over to the body as a slave and sentence it to death, because they have made themselves over to the body, and death has power over the body.

So let each man shape himself as far as he can toward modesty, cultivate a sense of shame, and guard chastity with his conscience and his mind. Let him not obey only the public laws: a man who follows the law of God should be above every law. And once he has got used to these good things, he will already be ashamed to slip away to worse ones — provided that what is right and honorable pleases him. It gives better men more delight than what is crooked and dishonorable gives worse men.

I have not yet worked through the whole duty of chastity. God limits it not only inside a man’s own walls but by the bounds laid down for the bed itself: when a man has a wife, he is not to want a slave woman or a free woman on top of her, but to keep faith with his marriage. It is not as the public law reckons it — that only the woman is an adulteress, if she has another man, while the husband, even if he has several women, is clear of the charge of adultery. The divine law joins two in marriage, that is, into one body, on equal terms, so that anyone who pulls the frame of that body apart in two directions counts as an adulterer.

And it was for no other reason that God, when he had willed that the other female animals should fight the male off once they had conceived, made the woman alone of them all able to receive her husband: namely, so that if women fought them off, lust would not force men to look elsewhere and by doing so lose the glory of chastity. Besides, a woman would not lay hold of the virtue of chastity if she were unable to sin. For who would call a dumb animal chaste because it fights the male off once it has conceived? It does that because it must come into pain and danger if it lets him near. There is no credit in not doing what you cannot do. Chastity is praised in a human being for this reason: it is not natural but willed.

So faith is to be kept by each toward the other; and more than that, a wife is to be taught by the example of self-control, so that she conducts herself chastely. It is unfair to demand what you cannot supply yourself. It is certainly this unfairness that has produced adulteries: women take it hard that they should keep faith with men who do not show them the same love in return. In fact there is no adulteress of so ruined a modesty that she does not put this reason forward for her vices — that in sinning she is not doing an injury but paying one back. Quintilian put it best: A man who neither keeps off another man’s marriage nor guards his own — things nature has tied together. For a husband who is busy corrupting other men’s wives can have no time left over for holiness at home; and a wife who has fallen into a marriage like that is stirred up by the example itself, and thinks she is either copying him or getting even.

So we must take care not to give vice its opening by our own lack of self-control. Let the characters of the two grow used to each other, and let them carry the yoke with minds that match. Let us think of ourselves in the other person. For nearly the whole of justice comes down to this: that you not do to another whatever you would not want done to you by another.

These are the commands God gives about self-control. Still, so that no one may think he can draw a line around God’s commands, these are added, to remove every quibble and every chance of cheating: that a man is an adulterer if he marries a woman her husband has dismissed, and so is a man who dismisses his wife for anything short of adultery in order to marry another; for God did not want that body broken up and pulled apart. And besides, not only adultery is to be avoided but the thought of it. No one is to look at another man’s wife and want her in his mind, since the mind itself turns adulteress if it so much as paints itself a picture of the pleasure. For it is the mind, certainly, that sins — the mind that takes in the fruit of unmeasured lust by thinking about it. In it lies the charge; in it lies every offense. Even if the body is marked by no stain, the account of modesty still does not balance if the mind is unclean, and chastity cannot look untouched where desire has fouled the conscience.

And let no one think it is hard to put a bridle on pleasure and to shut it, wandering and straying as it is, inside the boundaries of chastity and modesty — since men have even been set the aim of beating it altogether. A great many have kept the blessed and uncorrupted wholeness of their bodies, and there are many who enjoy this heavenly kind of life very happily indeed. God did not command it done as though he were binding anyone, since human beings have to be born, but as though he were allowing it; for he knows how great a necessity he laid on these urges. He says: If anyone can do this, he will have an outstanding and incomparable reward. That kind of self-control is like the peak of a roof, the crowning of all the virtues. If anyone can strain and struggle his way up to it, the Master will acknowledge him for his slave and the Teacher will acknowledge him for his student; he will hold a triumph over the earth; he will be like God, because he has taken hold of God’s own virtue. These things do look hard. But we are speaking about the man who has trampled everything earthly and has had his road to heaven made ready. Since virtue consists in the knowledge of God, everything is heavy while you do not know him, and easy once you have come to know him. We who are pressing toward the highest good have to make our way out through the difficulties themselves.

Still, no one should lose heart or give up on himself if he has turned aside onto the road of unrighteousness — beaten by passion, driven by desire, taken in by a mistake, or forced into it. He can be brought back and set free, if he repents of what he has done and turns to better things and makes amends to God. Cicero, in fact, thought this impossible. His words in the third book of the Academics are these: But if those who have gone the wrong way were allowed to correct their mistake by repentance, the way people are who have lost the road on a journey, it would be easier to mend rashness. They are altogether allowed to. For if we think our own children are set straight when we can see they are sorry for their faults — and though we have disinherited them and thrown them out, we take them back and hold them and love them again — why should we despair that the mercy of God our Father can be won back by repentance? So the one who is at once our Lord and the most indulgent of parents promises that he will let go the sins of a man who repents, and will wipe out all the wrongs of a man who starts afresh at doing what is right. Just as an upright past is no help to a man who now lives badly, because the wickedness that came after has destroyed his righteous works, so past sins do not stand in the way of a man who has mended his life, because the righteousness that came after has rubbed out the stain of his earlier one. [q]

For the man who repents of what he has done understands the mistake he made; and that is why the Greeks say it better and more tellingly with the word metanoia, which in Latin we can call coming back to a right mind. A man who is grieved over his mistake does come back to a right mind and recovers his senses as though from madness; he convicts himself of madness and settles his mind on a better way of living; and then above all he guards against this very thing, that he not be led into the same traps again. Even dumb animals do it. When they have been caught by a trick, if they somehow get themselves loose and away, they are more careful afterward, and always keep clear of anything in which they have spotted a trick or a snare. So repentance makes a man careful and painstaking about avoiding the faults he once fell into by being deceived.

No one can be so careful and so watchful that he never slips. And so God, who knows how weak we are, has in his kindness opened a harbor of refuge for us, so that the medicine of repentance might meet this need that our frailty leaves us open to. If anyone has gone wrong, then, let him retrace his step, and get himself back and put himself right as soon as he can.

For once men have tasted sweet pleasures, to their own harm, they can hardly be pulled off them; they would follow what is right more easily if they had never tasted how attractive those pleasures are. But if they do tear themselves out of that ruinous slavery, the whole of their error will be forgiven them, provided they have corrected it by a better life.

And let no one imagine he has come out ahead because there was no witness to his fault. Everything is known to the one in whose sight we live; and even if we can hide something from every human being, we cannot hide it from God, from whom nothing can be hidden and nothing kept secret. Seneca closed his book of exhortations with an admirable sentence: There is some great god, greater than can be imagined, and it is for him that we strive to live. Let us win his approval. It is no use keeping a conscience shut away; we lie open to God’s sight. What could a man who knew God say more truly than this, said by a man who does not know true religion? He put God’s majesty into words by saying that it is too great for the human mind’s power of thought to take in; and he touched the very spring of truth by seeing that human life is not pointless, as the Epicureans will have it, but that people make it their work to live for God — that is, if they live with justice and reverence. He could have been a true worshipper of God, if anyone had shown him God, and he would certainly have looked down on Zeno and on his own teacher Sotion, if he had found a true guide to wisdom. Let us win his approval, he says. That is truly a heavenly thing to say, if only an admission of ignorance had not come first. It is no use keeping a conscience shut away; we lie open to God’s sight. So there is no room for lying and none for pretending. Walls take human eyes away, but the divine power of God cannot be kept by our own insides from seeing straight through a man and knowing the whole of him. The same writer says, in the first book of the same work: What are you doing? What are you plotting? What are you hiding? Your guard goes with you. One companion is taken from you by a journey abroad, another by death, another by bad health; this one sticks to you, and you can never be without him. Why pick out a hidden place and get the witness out of the way? Suppose you have managed to escape everyone’s notice — you fool! What good does having no witness do you, if you have the witness of your own conscience?

And Cicero speaks no less remarkably about conscience and God. Let him remember that he has God for a witness — that is, as I judge it, his own mind, than which God has given a human being nothing more divine. Likewise, speaking of the just and good man, he says: And so such a man will not dare to do — or even to think — anything he would not dare to announce out loud. So let us clean out our conscience, which lies open to God’s eyes; and, as the same writer says, let us always live in such a way as to remember that we are going to have to give an account. Let us reckon that we are being watched every moment — not, as he said, by men in some theater of the world, but from above, by the one who is going to be both judge and witness; and when he asks for an account of our life, nobody will be allowed to deny what he did.

It is better, then, either to run away from conscience, or of our own accord to open our mind and tear our sores open and let the poison run out. No one else can heal those wounds but the one who made the lame walk, gave the blind back their sight, cleaned out limbs that disease had eaten, and raised the dead. He will put out the heat of our desires. He will tear our lusts up by the roots. He will take envy away. He will soften anger. He will give real and lasting health. Everyone ought to look for this cure, since the soul is troubled by greater danger than the body is, and a treatment ought to be put on hidden diseases as soon as possible.

Suppose a man’s eyesight is clear, all his limbs are sound, and his whole body is in the most vigorous health: even so I would not call him well if he is carried away by anger, swollen and puffed up with pride, a slave to lust, and burning with desires. I would sooner call this man well — one who does not lift his eyes to another man’s good fortune, who does not admire riches, who looks at another man’s wife with a chaste eye, who covets nothing at all, does not want what belongs to someone else, envies no one, looks down on no one; who is humble, merciful, generous, mild, and courteous. Peace lives in his mind all the time.

That man is well; he is just; he is complete. So whoever has obeyed all these heavenly commands is a worshipper of the true God, and this God’s sacrifices are gentleness of spirit, a life that harms no one, and good deeds. The man who shows all of these offers a sacrifice as often as he does anything good and reverent. For God does not want the sacrifice of a dumb animal, of death and blood, but of a human being and of a life. And for this sacrifice there is no need of sacred boughs, or of purification offerings, or of cut sods of turf — things that are plainly empty — but of what is brought out from deep inside a man. And so on God’s altar, which is the truly great one, which stands in a man’s heart, and which cannot be defiled with blood, there are laid righteousness, endurance, faith, innocence, chastity, and self-denial.

This is the truest rite. This is that law of God which Cicero calls glorious and divine, which always commands what is right and honorable and forbids what is wrong and shameful; and a man who obeys this most holy and certain law cannot fail to live justly and lawfully. I have set down a few chief points of this law, since I promised to speak only of the things that put the finishing peak on virtue and righteousness. If anyone wants to take in all the other parts as well, let him look for them at the spring itself, the one this stream flowed to us from.