A Plea for the Christians 32

It is no wonder that they invent about us the stories they tell about their own gods; they even exhibit the gods' sufferings as mysteries. But if they were going to judge free and indiscriminate intercourse a terrible thing, they ought to have hated Zeus, who had children by his mother Rhea and his daughter Kore, and took his own sister as wife; or Orpheus, the author of these stories, for making Zeus more unholy and abominable than Thyestes. For Thyestes lay with his daughter in obedience to an oracle, wanting to gain the kingdom and be avenged. But we are so far from indiscriminate intercourse that we are not even allowed to look with desire. “He who looks at a woman,” it says, “to desire her has already committed adultery in his heart.” We may not use our eyes for anything more than what God made them for, to be a light to us; for us, to look with pleasure is adultery, since the eyes were made for other purposes; and we shall be judged even for our thoughts. How then could such people be disbelieved when they say they are chaste? For our account is not with human laws, which a wicked man might even escape (I assured you at the beginning, sovereigns, that our teaching is taught by God), but we have a law that makes the measure of righteousness to treat our neighbors as ourselves. That is why, according to their age, we think of some as sons and daughters, regard others as brothers and sisters, and give to the older the honor due to fathers and mothers. Those, then, whom we think of as brothers and sisters and by the other names of kinship, we take great care that their bodies remain unviolated and undefiled. For the Word says to us again, “If anyone kisses a second time because it gave him pleasure …”; and adds, “So the kiss, or rather the greeting of reverence, must be given with the greatest care, since if it is clouded even a little by an impure thought, it shuts us out of eternal life.”