Exhortation to the Greeks 10.89–10.110

“But,” you say, “it is not reasonable to overturn a custom handed down to us from our fathers.” Then why do we not still use our first food, milk, to which our nurses accustomed us from birth? Why do we increase or diminish our father's property, instead of keeping it the same as we received it? Why do we no longer dribble on our fathers' laps, or still do the other things that made us laughed at when we were infants being brought up by our mothers? Have we not corrected ourselves, even if we did not happen to have good tutors? Then, in voyages, deviations from the course, though harmful and dangerous, somehow come as a pleasure; and in life shall we not abandon custom, which is wicked, passionate, and godless, even if our fathers are angry, and turn aside to the truth and seek him who is truly Father, thrusting custom away like a poisonous drug? This indeed is the finest part of my undertaking: to show you that it was from madness and from this thrice-wretched custom that godliness came to be hated. For so great a good, than which nothing greater has ever been given by God to the human race, would never have been hated or rejected, if you had not been carried away by custom, and then, stopping your ears against us, like stiff-necked horses throwing off the reins, biting on the bit, fled from our words, longing to throw us off, the charioteers of your life, and, carried by your folly toward the cliffs of destruction, you supposed the holy Word of God to be accursed.

(The holy Word of God, which you supposed accursed.) So there follow for you, as Sophocles says, the rewards of your choice: “mind departed, ears useless, thoughts empty”; and you do not know that this, more than anything, is true: that the good and godly, who have honored the good, will obtain a good reward, while the wicked, on the contrary, will receive fitting punishment, and punishment hangs over the ruler of wickedness. The prophet Zechariah threatens him: “May he who chose Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” What desire for voluntary death, then, still lies in human beings? Why have they fled to this deadly brand, with which they will be burned up, when they could live well according to God, not according to custom? For God grants life, but wicked custom, after our departure from here, inflicts an empty repentance along with punishment; “and the fool learns by suffering” how superstition destroys and godliness saves.

Let any of you look at those who serve before the idols: their hair filthy, disgraced in dirty and torn clothing, utterly unacquainted with baths, made like wild beasts by the length of their nails, and many of them deprived of their private parts, showing in deed that the precincts of the idols are tombs or prisons. These seem to me to mourn the gods, not to worship them, having suffered things more deserving of pity than of reverence. And seeing these things, are you still blind, and will you not look up to the Master of all and Lord of the universe? Will you not escape from the prisons here and take refuge in the mercy from heaven? For God, out of his great love for humankind, holds fast to the human being, as a mother bird flies to her nestling when it falls out of the nest; and if a creeping beast gapes at the nestling, “the mother flutters around, lamenting her dear children.” But God, as Father, both seeks his creature and heals its fall, pursues the beast, and takes the nestling back again, urging it to fly up …

… to the nest. Then again, dogs that have gone astray have tracked down their master by following the scent, and horses that have thrown their rider have obeyed their master at a single whistle. “The ox,” it says, “knows its owner, and the donkey its master's manger; but Israel has not known me.” What then does the Lord do? He bears no grudge; he still has mercy; he still asks for repentance. I want to ask you whether it does not seem absurd to you that you human beings, who are God's creatures, who received your soul from him, and who belong wholly to God, should serve another master, and moreover serve the tyrant instead of the king, and the evil one instead of the good. For who, in the name of truth, who is in his right mind, leaves the good and keeps company with wickedness? Who flees from God to live with daemons? Who, when he could be a son of God, delights in being a slave? Or who, when he could be a citizen of heaven, pursues darkness, when he could cultivate paradise, walk about heaven, and share in the living and pure spring, treading the air in the track of that bright cloud, like Elijah, and gazing on the rain of salvation? But others, like worms, rolling about in marshes and mud, the streams of pleasure, feed on useless and senseless luxuries, swinish men. For pigs, it says, “delight in mud” more than in clean water, and “go mad over filth,” as Democritus says. Let us not, then, let us not be enslaved or become swinish, but as true “children of light,” let us look up and gaze at the light, lest the Lord prove us bastards, as the sun does eagles.

Let us repent, then, and pass over from ignorance to knowledge, from folly to wisdom, from incontinence to self-control, from injustice to righteousness, from godlessness to God. It is a noble risk to desert to God. Those who love righteousness, who pursue eternal salvation, can enjoy many other good things too, and especially those that God himself hints at when he speaks through Isaiah: “There is an inheritance for those who serve the Lord.” Beautiful and lovely indeed is this inheritance: not gold, not silver, not clothing, where the moth and the thief somewhere creep in, eyeing the earthbound wealth; but that treasure of salvation, toward which we must hasten, becoming lovers of the Word; and our good deeds go away with us from here …

… and fly with us on the wing of truth. This inheritance the eternal covenant of God puts into our hands, supplying the eternal gift. This loving Father of ours, the true Father, does not cease exhorting, admonishing, training, loving; nor does he cease saving, but he counsels what is best: “Become righteous, says the Lord. You who thirst, come to the water; and you who have no money, go and buy and drink without money.” He calls us to the washing, to salvation, to illumination, all but crying out and saying: “I give you the earth and the sea, my child, and I grant you heaven and all the living things in them. Only, my child, thirst for the Father; God will be shown to you without price. The truth is not peddled; he gives you the birds and the fish and the creatures on the earth; the Father has made these for your thankful enjoyment.” The bastard, who is a child of destruction, who has chosen “to serve mammon,” will buy with money; but to you he entrusts what is yours, to you, I mean, the true son, who loves the Father, for whose sake he is still at work, to whom alone he also makes the promise: “And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity”; for it is not given over to corruption. “For all the earth is mine”; and it is yours too, if you receive God. Hence the Scripture fittingly brings good news to those who have believed: “The saints of the Lord will inherit the glory of God and his power.”

What glory, blessed one, tell me? That “which eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man; and they will rejoice in the kingdom of their Lord forever, amen.” You have, you people, the divine promise of grace; you have heard also the other, the threat of punishment; by these the Lord saves, training the human being with fear and grace. Why do we delay? Why do we not avoid the punishment? Why do we not accept the gift? Why do we not choose what is better, God instead of the evil one, and prefer wisdom to idolatry, and take life in exchange for death? “Behold,” he says, “I have set before your face death and life.” The Lord tests you, to see whether you will choose life; he counsels you as a father to obey God. “For if you listen to me,” he says, “and are willing, you will eat the good things of the land”: the grace of obedience. “But if you do not obey me and are not willing, the sword and fire will devour you”: the judgment of disobedience. “For the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things.” The Word of the Lord is the law of truth. Do you want me to be a good counselor to you? Then listen, and I will show you, if I can. You ought, you people, when you think about the Good itself, to bring forward an innate faith, a trustworthy witness at hand from within, which plainly chooses what is best, and not to ask whether it should be pursued, but to work hard at the good. For if the question were whether one should get drunk, say, doubt would be in order; yet you get drunk before you consider it. And whether one should behave outrageously, you do not inquire, but behave outrageously as fast as you can. Only whether one should be godly do you question, and whether one should follow this wise God and Christ: this you think worthy of deliberation and inquiry, without having understood what befits God, whatever it may be.

Believe us, at least as you would drunkenness, so that you may become sober; believe, at least as you would outrage, so that you may live. And if you wish to be persuaded by looking at the clear evidence of the virtues, come, I will set before you, out of abundance, the persuasion concerning the Word. And you (for your ancestral customs, in which you were instructed beforehand, no longer keep you from the truth) may now hear how the next point stands. And let no shame of this name take hold of you, “shame, which greatly harms men,” turning them aside from salvation. Stripping off, then, openly, let us contend truly in the stadium of truth, with the holy Word as umpire and the Master of the universe presiding over the games. For no small prize is set before us: immortality. So pay no more attention, not even a little, to what certain rabble of the marketplace say to you, godless dancers in the chorus of superstition, pushed by folly and madness into the very pit, makers of idols and worshipers of stones. For these have dared to make men gods, enrolling Alexander of Macedon as the thirteenth god, “whom Babylon …

… proved to be dead.” So I admire the sophist of Chios, Theocritus by name. After Alexander's death, mocking the empty opinions people had about gods, Theocritus said to his fellow citizens: “Men, take heart, as long as you see the gods dying before the men.” But whoever worships and makes a companion of visible gods and of the motley crowd of these created things is far more wretched than the daemons themselves. For God is in no way unjust, as the daemons are, but most just in every possible way; and there is nothing more like him than whoever of us becomes as just as possible.

“Come out into the road, all you craftsmen folk, who pray to Zeus's fierce-eyed daughter, the Worker, with winnowing baskets set up,” you foolish makers and worshipers of stones. Let your Phidias and Polyclitus come, and Praxiteles too and Apelles, and all who practice the mechanical arts, earthly workers of earth. For then, says a certain prophecy, things here will fare badly, when people put their trust in statues. Let them come again, then (for I will not stop calling them), these petty craftsmen. Not one of them has made a breathing image, nor molded soft flesh out of earth. Who melted the marrow, or who made the bones solid? Who stretched out the sinews, or who inflated the veins? Who poured blood into them, or who stretched skin around them? How could any of them make eyes that see? Who breathed a soul into it? Who bestowed righteousness? Who has promised immortality? Only the Creator of the universe, “the Father, the supreme artist,” fashioned such a living statue as us, the human being. But your Olympian Zeus, an image of an image, far out of tune with the truth, is a dumb work of Attic hands. For “the image of God” is his Word (and the divine Word is the true Son of Mind, the Light that is the archetype of light); and the image of the Word is the true human being, the mind in the human being, who is said for this reason to have been made “in the image” of God and “after his likeness,” being likened to the divine Word by the understanding of the heart, and in this way rational. But the man-shaped statues are an earthly image of the visible, earthborn man, and appear to be a transient impression, far from the truth.

So human life seemed to me to have become nothing but full of madness, busying itself with such zeal about matter. Custom, which gave you a taste of slavery and of senseless meddling, has been corrupted by empty opinion. And ignorance is the cause of lawless rites and deceitful pretenses; it † having furnished the human race with deadly fates and hateful idols, and having devised many forms of daemons, has stamped on those who follow it the stain of lasting death. Take, then, the water of the Word; wash, you who are defiled; sprinkle yourselves clean of custom with the true drops. We must go up to heaven pure. You are a human being, which is what is most common: seek the one who made you. You are a son, which is most your own: recognize your Father. But do you still remain in your sins, melted into pleasures? To whom will the Lord say, “Yours is the kingdom of heaven”? It is yours, if you are willing, you who have set your choice toward God; yours, if you are willing only to believe and follow the brevity of the proclamation, by obeying which the Ninevites, through genuine repentance, exchanged the capture they expected for a glorious salvation.

How then, one asks, shall I go up to heaven? The Lord is “the way”: “narrow,” but “from heaven”; narrow, but leading up to heaven; narrow as it is despised on earth, broad as it is worshiped in heaven. Then again, one who has never heard of the Word has ignorance as an excuse for his error; but one into whose ears it has been poured, and into his soul, bears his disobedience by his own choice; and the more intelligent he seems to be, the more his understanding is to his harm, because he has his own wisdom as accuser for not choosing what is best. For as a human being he is by nature akin to God. Just as we do not force the horse to plow, or the bull to hunt, but lead each animal to what it is suited for by nature, so we call the human being, who was made to contemplate heaven, truly a heavenly plant, to the knowledge of God, having grasped what is proper to him, excellent and distinctive above the other animals, and we counsel him to provide himself with godliness, a sufficient provision for the ages.

Till the soil, we say, if you are a farmer, but know God as you till it; and sail, you who love seafaring, but call on the heavenly Pilot. Has knowledge found you serving as a soldier? Listen to the commander who gives just orders. As if weighed down with stupor and drunkenness, then, sober up, look about a little, and consider what the stones you worship want with you, and what you spend so vainly on matter. You are squandering your money and your life on ignorance, as your living on death, finding only this as the end of your vain hope. You are not able to pity yourselves, and you are not fit to be persuaded by those who pity you for your error, enslaved as you are to wicked custom; clinging to it by your own choice to your last breath, you are swept down to destruction, “because the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light.” Yet you could wipe away what stands in the way of salvation, vanity and wealth and fear, repeating the poet's words: “Where am I taking all these goods? And where am I wandering myself?” Will you not, then, throw away these empty fancies and renounce custom itself, saying to vainglory: “False dreams, farewell; you were nothing after all”?

What, you people, do you think the Hermes Tychon is, and the Hermes of Andocides, and the Hermes Amyetus? Surely it is clear to everyone that they are stones, just like Hermes himself. And just as the halo around the moon is not a god, and the rainbow is not a god, but conditions of air and clouds; and as the day is not a god, nor the year, nor the time made up of these; so neither are the sun and moon, by which each of these is marked out. Who in his right mind, then, would suppose that correction, punishment, justice, and retribution are gods? Nor are the Furies, nor the Fates, nor Destiny, since neither the state nor glory nor wealth are gods, wealth, which painters even show as blind. If you deify shame and love and sexual desire, let disgrace, impulse, beauty, and intercourse follow them. Then sleep and death could no longer reasonably be considered among you “twin gods,” since these are conditions that happen naturally to living things; nor will you rightly call doom or destiny or the Fates goddesses. If strife and battle are not gods, neither are Ares and Enyo. Further, if lightning and thunderbolts and rainstorms are not gods, how are fire and water gods? And how are shooting stars and comets, which come into being through a condition of the air?

Whoever calls chance a god, let him call action a god too. If, then, not one of these is thought to be a god, nor any of those handmade and senseless images, and yet a providence of divine power is evident around us, there remains nothing but to confess that the only truly existing God alone truly is and subsists. But you fools are like people who have drunk mandrake or some other drug. May God grant you at last to wake from this sleep and understand God, and not to imagine gold or stone or tree or action or passion or disease or fear to be a god. For there truly are “thrice ten thousand daemons on the much-nourishing earth,” not “immortal,” nor even mortal (for they do not share in sensation, so as to share in death either), but masters of human beings made of stone and wood, insulting life and breaking faith with it through custom. “The earth is the Lord's,” it says, “and its fullness.” How then do you dare, while you enjoy the Lord's things, to ignore the Master? “Leave my earth,” the Lord will say to you; “do not touch the water that I send up; do not take the fruits that I cultivate. Repay God, man, for your upbringing. Recognize your Master. You are God's own creature; how could what is his own rightly become another's?” For what is estranged, deprived of its kinship, is deprived of the truth. Are you not, like Niobe in a way, or rather, to speak to you more mystically, like the Hebrew woman (the ancients called her Lot's wife), turning into senselessness?

We have received the tradition that this woman was turned to stone because she loved Sodom; and the Sodomites are the godless, and those who turn to impiety, hard-hearted and foolish. Consider these words to be spoken to you from God: Do not think that stones and wood and birds and snakes are sacred, and human beings not; quite the contrary: consider human beings to be truly sacred, and beasts and stones to be what they are. For the wretched and miserable among humankind think that God cries out through a raven or a jackdaw, but is silent through a human being; they have honored the raven as a messenger of God, but they persecute the man of God, who does not croak or caw but speaks. Alas! They try inhumanly to slaughter him who teaches them rationally and humanely, who calls them to righteousness, neither welcoming the grace from above nor avoiding the punishment. For they do not believe God, nor learn his power. But he whose love for humankind is inexpressible has a hatred of wickedness beyond measure. His wrath feeds punishment for sin, and his love for humankind does good in response to repentance. Most pitiable of all is to be deprived of God's help.

Blindness of the eyes and deafness of the ears are more painful than the evil one's other assaults; for the one takes away the sight of heaven, the other deprives us of divine learning. But you, crippled toward the truth, blind in mind and deaf in understanding, do not grieve, are not indignant; you have not desired to see heaven and the maker of heaven, nor have you sought to hear and learn the Creator and Father of all things, joining your choice to salvation. For nothing stands in the way of one who hastens to the knowledge of God, not lack of education, not poverty, not obscurity, not want of possessions; nor does anyone pray to obtain the truly real wisdom by “slaying with bronze” or with iron. For this, more than anything, is well said: “The good man is everywhere a savior.” For the one who is zealous for righteousness, as a lover of him who needs nothing, needs little himself, having stored up his blessedness in nothing else but in God himself, where there is no moth, no robber, no pirate, but the eternal Giver of good things. Rightly, then, you have been likened to those snakes whose ears are shut against the charmers. “Their wrath,” says the Scripture, “is like that of a serpent, like a deaf asp that stops its ears, which will not listen to the voice of the charmers.”

But you, at least, let your savagery be charmed away; receive the gentle Word, who is ours, and spit out the deadly poison, so that you may be granted, as far as possible, to strip off corruption, as those snakes strip off their old age. Listen to me, and do not stop your ears or block your hearing, but take to heart what is said. Beautiful is the medicine of immortality. Stop at last your creeping trails. “For the enemies of the Lord will lick the dust,” it says [the Scripture says]. Lift your heads from the earth to the ether, look up to heaven, wonder; stop lying in wait for the heel of the righteous and obstructing “the way of truth.” Be wise and harmless; perhaps the Lord will give you the wing of simplicity (he has chosen to give wings to those born of earth), so that you may leave your holes and dwell in the heavens. Only let us repent with our whole heart, so that we may be able to receive God with our whole heart. “Hope in him,” it says, “all the assembly of the people; pour out all your hearts before him”: he says this to those who are empty of wickedness; he has mercy and fills them with righteousness. Believe, man, in him who is man and God; believe, man, in him who suffered and is worshiped, the living God. Believe, you slaves, in him who died; all people, believe in him who alone is God of all people. Believe, and receive salvation as your reward. “Seek God, and your soul shall live.”

Whoever seeks God is concerned for his own salvation. Have you found God? You have life. Let us seek, then, that we may also live. The reward of finding is life with God. “Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you, and let them say continually, May God be magnified.” A beautiful hymn to God is an immortal human being, built up in righteousness, on whom the oracles of truth are engraved. For where else should righteousness be written but in a self-controlled soul? Where love? Where modesty? Where gentleness? Those who have sealed these divine writings in their soul should consider wisdom a good starting point, whatever part of life they have turned to, and should consider the same wisdom a calm harbor of salvation. Through her, those who have run to the Father are good fathers to their children; those who have understood the Son are good sons to their parents; those who remember the Bridegroom are good husbands to their wives; and those who have been ransomed from the utmost slavery are good masters to their servants.

O, the beasts are more blessed than humankind in its error! They live in ignorance, as you do, but they do not pretend to the truth. There are no tribes of flatterers among them; fish are not superstitious; birds do not worship idols; they marvel at heaven alone, since, being deprived of reason, they cannot understand God. Are you not ashamed, then, to have made yourselves more irrational than the irrational animals, you who have worn yourselves out in godlessness through so many ages of life? You have been children, then boys, then youths, then men, but never good. At least respect your old age; now that you have come to the sunset of life, be wise; at least at the end of life, recognize God, so that the end of your life may become the beginning of salvation. If you have grown old in superstition, come young to godliness; God will enroll you as innocent children. Let the Athenian follow the laws of Solon, the Argive those of Phoroneus, and the Spartan those of Lycurgus; but if you enroll yourself as God's, heaven is your fatherland and God your lawgiver. And what are the laws? “You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not corrupt boys, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall love the Lord your God.” And there are their complements, rational laws and holy words written on the hearts themselves: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and “To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also,” and “You shall not covet; for by desire alone …

… you have committed adultery.” How much better it is for people not even to wish at all to desire what they should not, than to obtain their desires! But you cannot bear the austerity of salvation. Just as we enjoy sweet foods and prefer them for the smoothness of the pleasure, while bitter things, though they roughen the palate, heal us and make us healthy, and the harshness of medicines strengthens those with weak stomachs; so custom pleases and tickles, but custom pushes us into the pit, while truth leads up to heaven, “rough” at first, “but a good nurse of the young.” This women's chamber is holy, and this council of elders is wise. Nor is she hard to approach or impossible to grasp; she is our nearest neighbor, dwelling within us, as the all-wise Moses says in a riddle, in our three parts: “in the hands, in the mouth, and in the heart.” This is a true symbol of the truth, fulfilled in all three: counsel, action, and speech. And do not fear this, that the many pleasant things that appear may rob you of wisdom; you yourself will willingly pass over the nonsense of custom, just as children throw away their toys when they become men.

… when they become men. With unsurpassable speed and approachable goodwill the divine power has shone on the earth and filled the universe with the seed of salvation. For the Lord could not have accomplished so great a work in so short a time without divine care: he who was despised in appearance but is worshiped in deed, the purifier, the savior, the gentle, the divine Word, truly the most manifest God, made equal with the Master of the universe, because he was his Son and “the Word was with God.” When he was first proclaimed he was not disbelieved; and when he took on the mask of a human being and was fashioned in flesh, and acted out the saving drama of humanity, he was not unrecognized. For he was a true contender, and a fellow contender with his creature. Spread most swiftly to all people, rising more quickly than the sun from the Father's very will, he most readily lit up God for us, showing, by what he taught and demonstrated, where he came from and who he was: the Word, the bearer of the covenant, the reconciler, our Savior, a life-giving and peaceful spring poured out over all the face of the earth, through whom, so to speak, everything has now become a sea of good things.