The Instructor 2.10.99

Your own poetry too writes reproachfully of a house and city in which they live licentiously: “Adulteries are with you, and lawless union of males with males, womanish and unjust, evil city, wholly unclean.” On the other hand it admires the self-controlled: “having no shameful desire for another's bed, nor rushing into the hateful and abominable outrage on a male,” because it is against nature. The many consider these things, their own sins, to be luxuries; those more reasonable than they recognize them as sins but are overcome by pleasures. And darkness is a cover for their passions. For the one who treats his own marriage as a courtesan's affair commits adultery against it, and does not hear the Instructor crying out: “The man who goes up on his bed, who says in his soul, Who sees me? Darkness is around me, and the walls are my shelter, and no one sees my sins; what should I fear? The Most High will not remember.” Most wretched is this man, fearing only the eyes of men and supposing that he will escape God's notice. “For he does not know,” says Scripture, “that the eyes of the Lord Most High are ten thousand times brighter than the sun, looking upon all the ways of men and perceiving the hidden places.” So again the Instructor threatens them through Isaiah, saying: “Woe to those who make plans in secret, and will say, Who sees us?” One may perhaps escape the perceptible light, but the intelligible light is impossible to escape, or as Heraclitus says, “How could anyone escape that which never sets?”