Miscellanies 7.3.14

These virtues, I say, are “an acceptable sacrifice” with God, since Scripture calls the humble heart joined with right understanding “a whole burnt offering to God,” as every human being taken up into holiness is enlightened into inseparable union. For both the gospel and the apostle command us to take ourselves captive and to put ourselves to death, killing “the old man that is being corrupted according to its desires” and raising “the new” from the death of the old perversion, laying aside the passions and becoming sinless. This, then, is what the law too was hinting at when it commanded that the sinner be put to death: the passing from death to life, the freedom from passion that comes from faith. Not understanding this, the teachers of the law, who took the law in a contentious sense, have given occasions to those who try in vain to slander it. For this reason we reasonably do not offer sacrifice to God, who lacks nothing and has provided all things to all; but we glorify him who was sacrificed for us, sacrificing ourselves, from what is without need toward what is without need, and from what is without passion toward what is without passion. For God takes pleasure only in our salvation. Reasonably, then, we do not bring sacrifice to one who is not overcome by pleasures, since the vapor of the smoke rises only somewhere down below, not even as high as the densest clouds, but far even from them, reaching only those whom it does reach.