Miscellanies 7.5.28–7.6.34

Or are we not right and true in not confining in any place the one who cannot be contained, and in not shutting up in temples “made with hands” the one who contains all things? What work of builders and stonecutters and mechanical craft could be holy? Are not those better than these who have thought the air and the surrounding heaven, or rather the whole world and the universe, worthy of God's pre-eminence? It would surely be ridiculous, as the philosophers themselves say, for a human being, who is “God's plaything,” to make God, and for God to become the plaything of a craft. For what is made is the same as, and like, that from which it is made: what is made from ivory is ivory, and what is made from gold is golden. But the statues and temples built by workmen are made from inert matter, so that they too would be inert, material, and profane; and even if you perfect the craft, the work shares in the mechanical. So the works of craft are no longer sacred and divine. And what could be set up and established, when nothing is unestablished, since all things are in place? Indeed, what is established is established by someone, having previously been unestablished. If, then, God is established by human beings, he was once unestablished and did not exist at all. For what would be unestablished is what does not exist, since it is what does not exist that gets established. But what exists could not be established by what does not exist, nor even by another existing thing, for that too exists.

It remains, then, that it is established by itself. And how will anything beget itself? Or how will what exists establish itself in being? Did it, being previously unestablished, establish itself? But then it would not even have existed, since what does not exist is unestablished. And how could what is thought to have been established later make itself into what it already was, existing beforehand? And that to which all existing things belong, how could it need anything? But if the divine has human form, it will need the same things as a human being: food, shelter, a house, and everything that goes with them; for those of the same shape and the same passions will need the same way of life. But if “temple” is taken in two senses, both God himself and the structure built in his honor, how should we not properly call the church, made holy for the honor of God according to knowledge, a temple of God, worth much and built not by mechanical craft, nor fashioned by the hand of a charlatan, but made into a shrine by the will of God? For I now call not the place but the assembly of the elect the church. This temple is better for receiving the greatness of God's dignity. For the living being worth much is consecrated, through its surpassing holiness, to the one who is worth everything, or rather to him with whom nothing is of equal worth. And this would be the one who knows, worth much, precious to God, in whom God is enshrined, that is, in whom knowledge of God is consecrated. Here too we might find the likeness, the divine and holy statue, in the righteous soul, when it is itself blessed, having been purified beforehand, and does blessed works. Here too is both what is established and what is being established: the one in those who already know, the other in those who are able to become so, even if they are not yet worthy to receive the understanding of God. For everyone who is going to believe is already faithful to God, a virtuous statue set up for his honor and dedicated to God.

Just as God is not circumscribed by place, nor ever represented by the shape of a living creature, so neither is he subject to the same passions, nor in need, as created things are, so as to crave sacrifices out of hunger, as if they were food. Things that passion touches are all perishable, and to bring food to one who is not nourished is futile. And that comic poet Pherecrates, in The Deserters, has charmingly made the gods themselves reproach human beings over their sacrifices: “When you sacrifice to the gods, first you set aside the customary portion for the priests, and then for yourselves; then (it is a shame to say it) you strip the two thighs clean right down to the groin, all the meat, and leave the loin quite bare, and the backbone that is left, filed down as with a rasp, you hand out to us as to the dogs; and then, ashamed before one another, you hide it under a heap of sacrificial cakes.” Eubulus, himself also a comic poet, writes somewhat like this about sacrifices: “To the gods themselves you sacrifice only the tail and the thigh, as to pederasts.” And bringing on Dionysus in Semele, laying down the terms, he has him say: “First, when people sacrifice anything to me, they sacrifice blood, bladder, liver, heart, the outer membrane; for I do not eat the sweet parts or the thigh.”

And Menander has written of “the tip of the loin and the gall, the inedible bones,” which, he says, “they set before the gods, while they consume the rest themselves.” For is not the smoking fat of whole burnt offerings something even wild beasts would flee from? But if the savor is truly the prize of the gods of the Greeks, they should lose no time in making gods of the cooks too, who are thought worthy of the same happiness, and in worshiping the oven itself, which comes even closer to the much-prized savor. And Hesiod says somewhere that Zeus, deceived by Prometheus in a division of meat, received “the white bones of an ox, by crafty art,” covered “with shining fat”: “and from that time the tribes of human beings on earth burn white bones for the immortals on fragrant altars.” But they say that God could by no means be nourished, as though afflicted with a desire arising from need. They will make him, then, like a plant that is fed without appetite, and like animals that hibernate in dens; for they say that these grow unharmed, nourished either by the density of the air or else by the vapor of their own body. And yet if, as they hold, the divine is nourished without needing it, what further need of food has what needs nothing? But if, being by nature without need, it rejoices in being honored, not unreasonably do we honor God through prayer, and send up this sacrifice, the best and holiest, with righteousness, revering him with the most righteous Word, through whom we receive knowledge, glorifying through him the one whom we have learned to know. Our altar here, the earthly one, is the assembly of those devoted to prayer, having as it were one common voice and one mind. And nourishment through the sense of smell, even if it is more divine than nourishment through the mouth, still implies breathing. What, then, do they say about God?

Does he breathe through his whole body, like the race of daemons? Or does he only take in breath, like water creatures, by opening the gills? Or does he breathe around himself, like insects, by the pressure of the wings on their segments? But if they are sensible, they would not liken God to any of these. And whatever breathes draws in the air by the expansion of the lungs against the chest. Then, if they give God entrails, arteries, veins, sinews, and members, they will be introducing a God no different from these creatures. But “breathing together” is properly said of the church. And indeed the sacrifice of the church is speech rising like incense from holy souls, while together with the sacrifice the whole mind is laid open to God. They have made much of the most ancient altar at Delos as pure, the only one, they say, that Pythagoras approached, because it was not defiled by slaughter and death; will they then disbelieve us when we say that the truly holy altar is the righteous soul, and the incense from it is holy prayer? Sacrifices, I think, were invented by human beings as a pretext for eating flesh. But even without such idolatry it was possible for anyone who wished to partake of meat. For the sacrifices according to the law are an allegory of the piety that concerns us: as the turtledove and the pigeon offered for sins indicate that the cleansing of the irrational part of the soul is acceptable to God. And if one of the righteous does not burden his soul by eating meat, he has a sound reason for it, not the reason of Pythagoras and his followers, who dream of the soul's passing into other bodies. Xenocrates, treating the subject on its own in On Food from Animals, and Polemon in his treatises On the Life according to Nature, seem to say clearly that food from flesh is unprofitable, being already worked over, and makes one like the souls of irrational animals.

In this way the Jews above all abstain from pork, as though this animal were unclean, since more than the others it roots up and destroys crops. And if they say that animals have been given to human beings, we too agree, but not at all for eating in every case, nor all of them, only those that do no work. That is why the comic poet Plato says not badly in his play The Festivals: “Of four-footed beasts we ought henceforth to kill none but pigs; for they have the sweetest meat, and nothing comes to us from a pig except bristles, mud, and squealing.” Hence Aesop too said, not badly, that pigs squeal loudest when they are dragged off, for they know they are useful for nothing except sacrifice. That is why Cleanthes too says that they have their soul instead of salt, to keep the meat from rotting. Some, then, eat it as useless, others do not eat it because it destroys crops, and others because the animal is much given to intercourse. In this way the law does not sacrifice the goat either, except only for sending away evils, since pleasure is the mother city of vice. Indeed, they say that eating goat's meat contributes to epilepsy. And they say that the most nourishment comes from pork; so it is useful for those who train the body, but no longer for those who try to strengthen the soul itself, because of the sluggishness that comes from eating meat. Perhaps one of those who know might abstain from eating flesh for the sake of discipline, and so that the flesh may not swell with sexual desire. “For wine,” says Androcydes, “and gorging on meat make the body strong but the soul more sluggish.” Such food, then, is unfit for precise understanding. That is why the Egyptians too, in their purifications, do not allow their priests to eat flesh; they use birds as the lightest food and do not touch fish, partly because of certain myths, but chiefly because such food makes the flesh flabby.

Now land animals and birds are nourished by breathing the same air as our souls, since they possess a soul akin to the air. But fish, they say, do not even breathe this air, but the air that was mixed into the water directly at its first creation, as it was into the other elements too, which is also evidence of the permanence of matter. One must, then, “offer to God sacrifices not costly but dear to God.” And that compound incense in the law is the one composed of many tongues and voices in prayer, or rather the one prepared from different nations and natures, by the gift given in the covenants, “into the unity of the faith,” and gathered together in hymns of praise, with a pure mind and a righteous and upright way of life, from holy deeds and righteous prayer. For, to borrow the poet's grace, “Who is so foolish, and so utterly credulous among men, as to hope that the gods, all of them, delight in fleshless bones and burnt gall, which not even hungry dogs would eat, and receive this as their prize, and repay the favor to those who offer it, even if they happen to be pirates, robbers, or tyrants?” But we say that fire sanctifies not flesh but sinful souls, meaning not the all-devouring fire of the workshop but the wise fire, which “penetrates through the soul” that passes through the fire.