Justice Is the Sacrifice

I have said what justice is and what it is like. Now I have to show what a true sacrifice to God is, and what the most just way of worshiping him is, so that nobody imagines God wants sacrificial animals, or incense, or costly gifts. He is not subject to hunger or thirst or cold or the desire for anything on earth, and so he has no use at all for the things people set out in temples and before earthly gods. Bodily offerings are needed by bodily beings; so plainly a being that has no body needs an offering that has no body. [a]

God has no need of the things he gave to us for our own use, since the whole earth is under his power. He needs no temple, because the world is his house. He needs no image, because neither the eyes nor the mind can take him in. He needs no lamps of ours, since he was able to light the sun and the other stars for us to use. What, then, does God ask of a person, except the worship of a mind that is pure and holy? The things made by hand, or that lie outside a person, are senseless, breakable, and no pleasure to him.

This is true sacrifice: what is brought out not from the strongbox but from the heart, offered not by the hand but by the mind. This is the acceptable victim, the one the mind sacrifices out of itself. For what good are the animals? What good the incense? What good the robes, the silver, the gold, the precious stones, if the worshiper’s mind is not clean? It is justice alone, then, that God requires. Sacrifice consists in that; the worship of God consists in that; and I must speak about it now, and show what actions justice necessarily has to contain.

That there are two ways of human life was not unknown either to the philosophers or to the poets, though the two of them set the ways out differently. The philosophers wanted one to be the way of hard work and the other the way of idleness; but they were the less accurate here, because they applied the two ways only to the advantages of this present life. The poets spoke better, saying that one is the way of the just and the other the way of the unjust; but they go wrong in placing them not in this life but among the shades below. Plainly we speak more accurately than either: one is the way of life and the other the way of death. Here too we say there are two ways — but the one on the right, which the just walk, does not lead to Elysium; it leads to heaven, for they become immortal. And the one on the left leads to Tartarus, for the unjust are sentenced to torture that never ends. So the way of justice, the way that leads to life, is the one we have to hold to. [d]

Now the first duty of justice is to acknowledge God as a parent, to fear him as a master, and to love him as a father. The same one who fathered us, who breathed the breath of life into us, who feeds us and keeps us alive, has over us the authority of a father and also of a master — the right to correct us, and the power of life and death. So a double honor is owed him from us: love joined with fear.

The second duty of justice is to acknowledge every man as a brother. If the same God made us, and brought all people into the world on equal terms for justice and for eternal life, it is plain that we are bound together by the kinship of brothers, and whoever does not acknowledge this is unjust. But the source of the evil that has torn apart the common society of men and the bond of kinship is ignorance of the true God. Anyone who does not know that fountain of generosity cannot possibly be good.

That is why, from the time when men began to consecrate and worship a crowd of gods, justice — as the poets tell it — was put to flight, every agreement was destroyed, and the fellowship of human justice was destroyed with it. After that each man looked to his own interest, counted strength as right, injured his neighbor, went at people with frauds, cheated them out of their property by treachery, built up his own advantage out of other men’s trouble, spared neither relatives nor children nor parents, mixed poisoned cups to destroy men with, waited on the roads with a sword, made the seas unsafe, and gave his lust free rein wherever it drove him. In short, he held nothing sacred that his own dreadful appetite did not violate.

When things had come to that, men set up laws for themselves for the public good, so that they might at least protect themselves from injury in the meantime. But fear of the laws did not put down crime; it only checked open license. The laws could punish offences; they could not punish a conscience. So what had been done in the open began to be done in secret. Justice was got around by stealth as well, because the very men who presided over the administration of the laws were bought with gifts and payments and made a trade of their verdicts, either to let the guilty off or to destroy the good. On top of this came quarrels, and wars, and men plundering one another; and with the laws crushed, the power to act by violence was taken up with no restraint at all.

While the affairs of men stood like this, God took pity on us. He revealed and displayed himself to us, so that in him we might learn religion, faith, purity, and mercy; so that, having laid aside the mistaken life we used to live, we might come to know both God and ourselves — for our godlessness had cut us off from him — and so that we might take up, by our own choice, the divine law that joins human affairs to heavenly ones, with the Lord himself handing it down to us. By that law all the errors we had been trapped in could be taken away, and the empty and godless superstitions with them. [h]

What we owe to other people, then, is laid down by that same divine law, which teaches that whatever you give to a person is given to God. But the root of justice, and the whole foundation of fairness, is this: do not do what you would be unwilling to have done to you, and measure another man’s feelings by your own. If it is a hard thing to bear an injury, and the man who did it looks unjust, then transfer to another’s person what you feel about yourself, and to your own person what you judge about another, and you will understand that you act just as unjustly when you injure another as another would if he injured you.

If we take all this in, we will hold on to doing no harm, and that is where the first step of justice is contained. For the first thing is not to injure; the next is to be of use. And just as in untilled ground the fields have to be cleared before you begin to sow, by tearing up the thorns and cutting out every root and stump, so the vices have first to be thrust out of our souls, and only then are the virtues planted — and out of them the fruits of immortality spring up, brought to birth by the word of God.

There are three passions — three furies, one might say — that stir up such great upheavals in the souls of men, and sometimes drive them to offend in such a way that they have no regard left for their reputation or even for their own safety. These are anger, which wants revenge; greed, which longs for riches; and lust, which chases pleasures. These are the vices we have above all to resist; these are the stumps that have to be pulled out, so that virtues can be planted. [k]

The Stoics hold that these passions must be cut away. The Peripatetics think they must be kept in check. Neither judges rightly. They cannot be taken away entirely, since nature planted them in us and their pull is certain and strong; and they cannot merely be reduced, since if they are evil we ought to be without them altogether, even held in and used with moderation, and if they are good we ought to use them whole. Our position is that they should be neither taken away nor lessened. They are not evil in themselves, since God had good reason for planting them in us; they are plainly good by nature, for they were given to us to protect life, and they turn evil by being put to evil use. Bravery is a good thing if you fight for your country and an evil thing if you fight against it; in the same way the passions will be virtues if you put them to good purposes, and will be called vices if you put them to bad ones.

So anger was given by God for holding offences down — that is, for keeping discipline over those in a man’s charge, so that fear may put down license and hold recklessness back. But men who do not know its limits are angry with their equals, or even with those above them. From there they rush into acts of cruelty; from there they rise to killings; from there to wars. Greed too was given, so that we would want and look for what life needs. But men who are unacquainted with its boundaries strain insatiably to heap up riches, and out of that have burst poisonings, swindles, forged wills, every kind of fraud. And the passion of lust is planted and inborn in us for the having of children; but men who do not fix limits for it in their minds use it for pleasure alone, and out of that come forbidden loves, adulteries, debaucheries, corruption of every kind. So these passions have to be kept inside their boundaries and steered onto their right course; and on that course, even if they run hard, they cannot come in for blame.

Anger is to be held back when we suffer an injury, so that the evil that threatens out of a quarrel may be put down, and so that we may keep two of the greatest virtues, harmlessness and patience. Let greed be broken off once we have what is enough. What madness it is to labor at heaping up things that must pass to somebody else, whether by robbery, or theft, or confiscation, or death. Let lust go no further than the marriage bed, and let it serve the having of children. Too great an eagerness for pleasure both brings on danger and breeds disgrace, and — the thing above all to be avoided — it leads to eternal death. Nothing is so hateful to God as an unchaste mind and an unclean soul. [o]

And nobody should think he has only to keep away from that one pleasure, the pleasure got from the joining of a woman’s body. He must keep away from the other pleasures too, the ones that arise through the rest of the senses, because they are vicious in themselves and it belongs to the same virtue to think little of them. The eyes take their pleasure from the beauty of things, the ears from tuneful and agreeable sounds, the nostrils from sweet smells, the taste from rich food. Virtue ought to fight every one of them hard, in case the soul is caught by these attractions and pulled down from heavenly things to earthly ones, from things eternal to things that pass, from immortal life to punishment that never ends.

In the pleasures of taste and smell the danger is this: they are able to drag a man into luxury. Whoever is given up to them will either have no property left, or, if he has any, he will spend it and afterwards live a life fit to be loathed. But the man who is carried away by hearing — to say nothing of songs, which so often charm the deepest senses that they can even unsettle a mind at rest into madness — is easily led off into godless worship by elaborately built speeches, by tuneful poems, by clever debates. That is why men who are eloquent themselves, or who would rather read eloquent writing, do not readily believe the sacred books: they look unpolished. Such men are not looking for what is true but for what is pleasant; in fact the things that soothe their ears strike them as the truest of all. And so they throw the truth away while they are being charmed by the sweetness of the language.

But the pleasure that has to do with sight takes many forms. The pleasure drawn from the beauty of costly things stirs up greed, which ought to be kept far away from a wise and just man; and the pleasure taken in the look of a woman hurries a man on to that other pleasure I have already spoken about.

It remains to speak about the public shows. Since they have a more powerful influence toward corrupting the mind, the wise ought to avoid them and guard against them altogether, and this because they are said to have been set up in celebration of the honors of the gods. The exhibitions of the games are festivals of Saturn. The stage belongs to Father Liber, and the games in the Circus are supposed to be dedicated to Neptune. So a man who takes part in these shows looks as though he has left off the worship of God and gone over to profane rites. [r]

But I would rather speak about the thing itself than about where it came from. What is so dreadful, what so foul, as the killing of a man? That is why our life is protected by the strictest laws; that is why wars are detestable. And yet custom has found a way for a man to commit homicide without a war and without any law, and he takes pleasure in it, on the ground that he has punished guilt. But if being present at a killing carries a share in the guilt, and the spectator is caught up in the same guilt as the man who does it, then in these slaughters of gladiators the man who watches is spattered with blood no less than the man who spills it. He cannot be free of the guilt of bloodshed when he wanted the blood poured out; he cannot claim not to have killed when he backed the killer and called for his prize.

And what about the stage? Is it any holier — the stage where comedy talks about debaucheries and love affairs, and tragedy about incest and the murder of one’s own family? The shameless gestures of the actors, in which they imitate disreputable women, teach the very lusts they act out in the dance. The mime is a training school in seduction, where the things that are shameful are performed in a picture so that the things that are real may be done without shame. These are the shows that young men watch, at the very age that most needs curbing and governing; and these performances train them to vices and sins.

The Circus, it is true, is thought more innocent, but the madness in it is greater, since the minds of the spectators are carried away with such fury that they do not only break out in abuse but often rise to quarrels and fights and pitched battles. So all shows are to be avoided, if we mean to keep a mind at rest. We must give up the pleasures that do us harm, or, charmed by a sweetness that carries the plague, we will fall into the snares of death.

Let virtue alone please us — virtue, whose reward is immortal once it has conquered pleasure. And when the passions have been overcome and the pleasures put down, the work of suppressing everything else is easy for a man who follows God and the truth. He will never speak abusively of anyone, since he is hoping for a blessing from God. He will not swear falsely, in case he should make a mockery of God; in fact he will not swear at all, in case at some point either necessity or habit should carry him into a false oath. He will say nothing deceitfully and nothing with a mask on. He will not go back on what he has promised, and he will not promise what he cannot do. He will envy no one, being content with himself and with what is his own; and he will not take anything away from another man, or wish him ill, even where God’s good gifts perhaps run more readily toward that man than toward him. [v]

He will not steal, and he will not covet anything at all that belongs to someone else. He will not put his money out at interest, since that is looking for profit out of other people’s troubles; but he will not refuse to lend, either, if need forces a man to borrow. He must not be harsh toward a son, or toward a slave: he must remember that he himself has a Father and a Master. He will act toward them as he would wish others to act toward him. He will not accept large gifts from people whose means are smaller than his own, because it is not just for the estates of the wealthy to be built up out of the losses of the wretched.

It is an old command not to kill. It ought not to be taken narrowly, as though we were ordered only to keep clear of murder, which even the public laws punish. Under this command it will not be permitted to us to put a man in danger of death by a word, or to kill an infant or to expose one, or to condemn ourselves by a death of our own choosing. We are likewise commanded not to commit adultery; but this command does not only forbid us to violate another man’s marriage, which even the common law of the nations condemns — it tells us to keep away from women who sell their bodies as well. For the law of God stands above all laws. It forbids even the things that are reckoned lawful, so that it may fulfill justice.

It is part of the same law not to give false testimony, and this too has a wider reach than it appears to have. For if false testimony damages by its falsehood the man it is spoken against, and deceives the man it is spoken in front of, then we must never speak falsely at all, because a falsehood always deceives or damages someone. So a man is not just if he speaks falsely even in idle talk, without inflicting any injury by it. Nor is he allowed to flatter, since flattery is ruinous and deceitful; he will guard the truth everywhere instead. And though the truth may be unwelcome for the moment, still, when its advantage and usefulness come out, it will not produce hatred, as the poet says, but gratitude.