Against Celsus 8.28

Having set out his next statement too, come, let us again examine it as well as we can. It runs thus: “If in keeping with some ancestral custom they abstain from certain such sacrificial victims, then they must abstain entirely from eating all animals, as Pythagoras too thought, honouring the soul and its organs. But if, as they say, it is so as not to feast with demons, I congratulate them on their wisdom, that they are slow to understand that they are always table-companions of demons. And they guard against this only when they see a victim being sacrificed; but when they eat bread and drink wine and taste fruits, and drink water itself and breathe the air itself, do they not receive each of these from certain demons, to each of whom the care of each part has been assigned?” I do not know how it seemed to him to follow from this that those whom he described as abstaining from certain victims in keeping with some ancestral custom must abstain from eating all animals. We do not say this, as though the divine Word did not also suggest such things, saying, for the sake of a safer and purer life, “It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything by which your brother stumbles,” and again, “Do not by your food destroy him for whom Christ died,” and again, “If meat makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, so that I may not make my brother stumble.”