The Gift and the Sacrifice

Now let me speak briefly about sacrifice itself. Plato says: “Ivory is not a pure offering to God.” What then? Are embroidered and costly fabrics? No — nothing is a pure offering to God that can rot or be quietly carried off. But when Plato saw this much, that nothing taken from a dead body ought to be offered to a living being, why did he not see that a bodily offering ought not to be presented to a being who has no body? [a]

How much better, and how much more truly, Seneca speaks: “Would you think of God as great and calm, a friend to be revered with a gentle majesty, and always close at hand? Then he is not to be worshipped by the slaughtering of victims and with a great deal of blood — for what pleasure comes out of the killing of harmless animals? — but with a pure mind and with a good and honorable purpose. Temples are not to be built for him out of stones piled up high; each man is to consecrate him in his own breast.”

So if anyone thinks that clothing and jewels and the other things we count precious are prized by God, he does not know at all what God is, since he supposes that things please God which even a man would be rightly praised for looking down on. What, then, is pure? What is worthy of God? Only what he himself has demanded in that divine law of his.

There are two things that ought to be offered: the gift and the sacrifice — the gift as a standing offering, the sacrifice for one occasion. But with people who have no grasp of what the divine being is, a gift is anything worked in gold or silver, or anything woven out of purple and silk, and a sacrifice is a victim, and everything burned on the altar. But God makes use of neither the one nor the other, because he is free of decay, and all of that is perishable. So in both cases what is offered to God must be something without a body, for that is what he accepts. His offering is innocence of soul; his sacrifice is praise and a hymn. For if God is not seen, then he ought to be worshipped with things that are not seen.

So no religion is true except the one that consists of virtue and justice. And it is easy enough to understand how God deals with a man’s justice. If a man is just, then, once he has received immortality, he will serve God forever. That human beings are born for nothing but justice is something the old philosophers suspected, and even Cicero. Discussing the Laws, he says: “But of all the matters that learned men discuss, surely nothing is of greater importance than that it should be completely understood that we are born for justice.”

We ought therefore to hold out and offer to God the one thing for the receiving of which he produced us.

How true this twofold kind of sacrifice is, Hermes Trismegistus is a fitting witness, a man who agrees with us — that is, with the prophets, whom we follow — as much in substance as in words. He spoke about justice this way: “Adore and worship this word, my son.” And the worship of God consists of one thing: not being wicked. In that perfect discourse of his, too, when he heard Asclepius asking his son whether it would please him to have incense and other fragrances offered to his father for a divine sacrifice, he cried out: “Hush, Asclepius! It is the deepest irreverence to hold any such thought about that being of surpassing goodness. These things, and things like them, do not suit him. He is full of everything there is, as much of it as exists, and he has need of nothing at all. Let us instead give him thanks and adore him. His sacrifice consists of blessing, and of nothing else.” And he was right.

For we ought to sacrifice to God in words, since God is the Word, as he himself has declared. So the chief ceremony in the worship of God is praise from the mouth of a just man, directed toward God.

But if that praise is to be accepted by God, there is need of humility, and fear, and devotion in the highest degree — in case a man should happen to place confidence in his own uprightness and innocence, and so run into the charge of pride and arrogance, and by that act lose the reward of his virtue. But so that he may win God’s favor and be clear of every stain, let him always beg for the mercy of God, and pray for nothing else but pardon for his sins, even if he has none. If he wants anything else, there is no need to put it into words for one who knows what we wish.

If anything good happens to him, let him give thanks. If anything bad, let him make amends, and let him admit that the evil has come to him on account of his own faults. And even in bad times let him give thanks all the same, and in good times make amends all the same, so that he may be the same man at every hour, and steady, and unchanging, and unshaken.

And let him not suppose that this is to be done by him only in the temple, but at home, and even in his own bed. In short, let him always have God with him, consecrated in his heart, since he is himself a temple of God. And if he has served God — his Father and Lord — with this constancy, obedience and devotion, then justice is whole and complete; and the man who keeps it, as I testified before, has obeyed God, and has met everything that religion and his own duty require of him.