Miscellanies 7.6.32

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.