De ieiunio adversus psychicos

I should be surprised at the Psychics if they were held captive by lust alone, the lust that drives them so often to marry, were they not also torn by gluttony, in whose name they hate fasting. Lust without gluttony would surely be reckoned a freak, since these two are so welded and grown together that, if they could ever be wholly separated, the parts of shame would not, in the first place, be attached so near the belly. Look at the body, and there is one single region. In short, the order of the vices follows the arrangement of the members. First the belly, and at once, built upon it, the wantonness of the rest of the flesh; through gluttony comes the passage to lechery. I recognize, then, the animal faith bound up wholly with the cult of the flesh, prone to much-devouring no less than to much-marrying, so that it deservedly accuses the spiritual discipline, its rival for the same substance, in this species too of continence, since that discipline likewise puts a bridle on gluttony at times by no food, or food late or dry, just as it puts one on lust by allowing but a single marriage. It already wearies me to grapple with such people; I am already ashamed to wrangle over those whose very defence is shameless. For how am I to defend chastity and sobriety without an appraisal of my adversaries? Who these people are can be named once for all: the outer and inner sausages of the Psychics. These men pick a quarrel with the Paraclete; for this cause the new prophecies are rejected. Not that Montanus and Priscilla and Maximilla preach another God, nor that they unbind Jesus Christ, nor that they overthrow any rule of faith or hope, but simply that they teach men to fast more often than to marry. As to the manner of marrying, we have already published our defence of monogamy. Now the battle is over the chastening of diet, a continence second to that other, or rather first of all. They charge us with keeping fasts of our own, with prolonging Stations generally into the evening, with observing even Xerophagies, drying our food of all flesh and all gravy and the moister kinds of fruit, eating or drinking nothing that has the savour of wine; with abstaining too from the bath, as suits a dry diet. Novelty, then, is what they fling at us; about whose unlawfulness they would lay down this rule: that it must be judged a heresy if it is human presumption, or pronounced a false prophecy if it is a spiritual injunction—provided that on every side we who announce things otherwise hear ourselves anathematized.

For as regards fasting, they set against us the days fixed by God, as when in Leviticus the Lord enjoins upon Moses the tenth day of the seventh month, the day of atonement: "It shall be a holy day for you," He says, "and you shall afflict your souls; and every soul that is not afflicted on that day shall be cut off from his people." Certainly they think that in the Gospel those days were marked out for fasting in which the Bridegroom was taken away, and that these alone are now the lawful fasts of Christians, the legal and prophetic antiquities being abolished. For wherever it suits them, they acknowledge what is meant by "the Law and the prophets until John." And so for the rest, fasting is to be done indifferently, by choice and not by command, according to a new discipline, to suit the times and occasions of each man. So too, they say, the apostles observed it, imposing no other yoke of fixed fasts to be undertaken by all in common, and likewise none of Stations, which themselves indeed have their own days, the fourth and the sixth of the week, yet run loosely, neither under the law of a precept nor beyond the latest hour of the day, since prayers also are generally concluded at the ninth hour, on the example of Peter recorded in the Acts. As for Xerophagies, they call it a newfangled name for an affected observance, and one closely akin to pagan superstition, such as the abstinences by which they purify Apis, Isis and the Great Mother by excepting certain foods—whereas faith, free in Christ, owes the abstinence from certain foods not even to the Jewish Law, the whole shambles having been once for all permitted by the Apostle, who denounces those who, just as they forbid to marry, so command to abstain from foods which God created. And therefore (they say) we were already long ago foretold as those who in the last times depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits of the world, having our conscience seared by the doctrines of liars. By what fires, I ask you? By those, I suppose, with which we so often light the way to weddings and daily cook our suppers? So too they say that we, like the Galatians, are smitten as observers of days and months and years. Meanwhile they hurl at us that Isaiah also declared, "Not such a fast has the Lord chosen"—that is, not abstinence from food, but the works of righteousness which he goes on to weave in; and that the Lord himself in the Gospel answered every scruple about diet in a single phrase, that a man is not defiled by what enters into the mouth, but by what proceeds out of the mouth—since he himself both ate and drank to the point of being branded: "Behold a glutton and a wine-bibber!" So too, they say, the Apostle teaches that "food does not commend us to God, neither if we eat are we the better, nor if we eat not are we the worse." By these and suchlike considerations they now subtly aim at this: that everyone who is the more prone to his belly may reckon as superfluous and not at all necessary the duties of food taken away, or diminished, or delayed—since God, they say, prefers the works of righteousness and innocence. And we know what kind of persuasions favour fleshly comforts, how readily it is said: "What is needful is that I believe with my whole heart, that I love God and my neighbour as myself. For on these two precepts hang the whole Law and the prophets—not on the emptiness of my lungs and intestines."

And so we must first affirm this very thing which is secretly in danger of being undermined: how much weight this emptiness has with God, and above all from what source the very reason proceeded of meriting God's favour in this way. For then will the necessity of the observance be recognized, when the authority of the reason, to be traced from the beginning, has shone clear. Adam had received from God the law of not tasting of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, doomed to die if he tasted. But he himself then, having reverted to the natural man after the spiritual ecstasy in which he had prophesied that great mystery concerning Christ and the Church, and no longer grasping the things that were of the spirit, yielded more easily to his belly than to God, assented to the food rather than to the precept, and sold his salvation for his gullet. In short, he ate and perished—though he might otherwise have been saved, had he chosen rather to fast against one little tree—so that henceforth animal faith may recognize its own seed, deriving from that source the appetite for things carnal and the refusal of things spiritual. I hold, therefore, from the beginning, that the murderous gluttony was to be punished with the torments and sufferings of hunger, even had God enjoined no fasts at all. Yet by showing whence Adam was slain, He had left me to understand the remedies of the offence, He who had pointed out the offence. Of my own accord I would reckon food, by whatever means and at whatever times I could, as poison, and would take hunger for an antidote, by which I might purge the cause of death, transmitted from the beginning into me also together with the whole race—being sure that God wills this, whose contrary He has forbidden, and confident enough that the care of continence will please Him by whom I had learned that the guilt of incontinence had been condemned. Moreover, since He Himself both enjoins fasting and properly calls the soul shaken by the very straits of food a sacrifice, who will any longer doubt that this was the reason of all the macerations regarding diet: that, by food again being forbidden and the precept observed, the primordial transgression might be expiated, so that man might make satisfaction enough to God through the very matter of his guilt—that is, through the forbidding of food—and so might rekindle his salvation by hunger in a rivalling manner, as he had extinguished it by surfeit, despising many things lawful for the one thing unlawful?

This reason was kept with the providence of God, who measures all things to suit the times—lest anyone from the opposite side, to overthrow our proposition, should say: "Why then did God not at once establish some chastening of diet—nay rather, why did He even enlarge the permission?" For in the beginning indeed He had assigned to man only the food of herbs and trees: "Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing herb yielding seed which is upon the earth, and every tree which has in itself the fruit of seed-bearing seed: it shall be to you for food." But afterward to Noah, when the subjection of all the beasts of the earth and the birds of the heaven and the things that move on the earth and the fishes of the sea and every serpent had been enumerated, He says: "They shall be to you for food: as the green herbs I have given you all things; but flesh in the blood of its soul you shall not eat." For by this very thing, that He excepts from eating that flesh alone whose soul is not poured out through the blood, it is plain that He has granted the use of all the rest of the flesh. To this we answer: it was not fitting that man should yet be burdened with any law of abstinence, when he could by no means endure even so light a prohibition—that, namely, of a single fruit; and so, given over to liberty itself, he was to be strengthened by it. Likewise, after the flood, in the reformation of the human race, one law for the present sufficed: that of abstaining from blood, with the use of the rest permitted. For already the Lord had shown His judgment through the flood, and had moreover threatened it through the requiring of blood "from the hand of a brother and from the hand of every beast." And so, supplying beforehand the justice of judgment, He sent forth the matter of liberty, undergirding the discipline through pardon, permitting all things that He might take away certain things—meaning to exact more if more had been committed, meaning to command abstinence once He had set indulgence first, so that the more, as we have said, the primordial transgression might be expiated by the working of a greater abstinence in the occasion of a greater license.

Then, when at last a household people began to be chosen for God and the restoration of man could be set in train, then all the laws and disciplines were imposed, even such as should prune the diet, certain foods being taken away as unclean, that man might the more easily at length endure fasts by having practised perpetual abstinence in certain matters. For the first people too had carved anew the crime of the first man, being caught more prone to the belly than to God, when, after they had been snatched from the hardness of the Egyptian bondage by the strong hand of God and the lofty arm, and their Lord had been seen, and they were destined for a land flowing with milk and honey, at once, scandalized at the prospect of the unprovisioned wilderness and sighing for the losses of Egyptian fullness, they murmured against Moses and Aaron: "Would that we had perished, smitten by the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat over the pots of flesh and ate bread to the full! Why have you led us out into this desert to kill this whole assembly with hunger?" With the same preferring of the belly they were soon to bewail those same leaders of theirs and arbiters of God, whom they exasperated by their craving for flesh and their recollection of the abundance of Egypt. "Who shall feed us with flesh? We remember the fish which we ate in Egypt freely, and the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic. But now our soul is parched; our eyes see nothing but manna." So to them too the angelic loaves of Xerophagy were displeasing; they would rather have smelt of garlic and onion than of heaven. And therefore, from men so ungrateful, all that was more pleasant and more dainty was withdrawn—at once to punish gluttony and to exercise continence, so that the one might be condemned and the other schooled.

Now if we have rashly recalled to the proofs of the beginnings the reasons of a diet chastened by God and to be chastened by us for God's sake, let us consult our common consciousness. Nature itself will declare what kind of persons we have been wont to show ourselves, before food and drink, while the saliva is still virgin—in matters at least to be dealt with by the intellect, by which divine things are handled: whether we are then of far more vigorous mind, of far more lively heart, than when all that dwelling of the inner man is stuffed with food, flooded with wine, and, already seething to digest its dung, is made an anteroom of the privies—wherein plainly nothing so much remains at hand as to relish wantonness. "The people ate and drank, and rose up to play." Understand the modesty of holy Scripture: it would not have noted the play unless it were shameless. For the rest, how rarely does anyone remember religion when the seats of memory are occupied and the limbs of wisdom impeded? No one, as is fitting, as is right, as is profitable, will remember God at that time when it is his custom to lose his very humanity. Every discipline of diet either kills or wounds. I lie, if the Lord Himself, reproaching Israel's forgetfulness of Him, does not impute the cause to fullness: "My beloved grew fat and thick and broad, and forsook God who made him, and departed from the Lord his Saviour." And so in the same Deuteronomy, commanding that this same cause be guarded against, He says: "Lest, when you have eaten and drunk and built the best houses, your sheep and oxen being multiplied and your silver and gold, your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God." He has set the enormity of gluttony before the corruption of riches—the very riches which gluttony procures. By those riches, no doubt, the people's heart had been made gross, so that it could not see with the eyes nor hear with the ears nor perceive with the heart, blocked up with the fat which by name He took away from their eating, unteaching man the cult of surfeit. For the rest, in whom was found a heart erect rather than fattened—he who for forty days and as many nights prolonged a fast beyond the capacity of human nature, his spiritual faith supplying the strength, and saw with his eyes the glory of God and heard with his ears the voice of God and perceived with his heart the law of God, already then teaching that man lives not by bread alone but in every word of God—since indeed the grosser people could not even steadily behold Moses himself, fed by God and fattened by fasting in His name? Deservedly, then, did the Lord show Himself in the flesh to him, the colleague of His own fasts—and no less to Elijah. For Elijah too, by this first act, that he had imprecated a famine, had already sufficiently vowed himself to fasting. "The Lord lives," he says, "before whom I stand, if there shall be dew or rain in these years." Then, fleeing the threatening Jezebel after the single food and drink which, awakened by the angel, he had found, he too came for forty days and nights, with empty belly and dry mouth, to Mount Horeb; where, having turned aside into a cave, with how familiar a meeting was he received by God! "What are you here, Elijah?" A voice far friendlier than "Adam, where are you?" For that threatened the man who had eaten; this caressed the man who had fasted. So great is the prerogative of a stinted diet, that it renders God a tent-fellow to man, peer indeed with peer. For if the eternal God shall not hunger, as He testifies through Isaiah, this will be the time when man is made equal to God—when he lives without food.

We have proceeded, then, to examples, that by their effective profit we may unfold the powers of this duty, which reconciles even an angry God to man. Israel had transgressed, gathered for the drawing of water at Mizpah by Samuel; but they so straightway washed out the transgression by fasting that they at the same time poured forth the peril of battle. At the very moment when Samuel was offering the burnt sacrifice—in nothing do we hear God's clemency more procured than by the people's abstinence—and the aliens were bringing on battle, there and then "the Lord thundered with a great voice over the aliens, and they were confounded and fell before Israel; and the men of Israel went forth out of Mizpah and pursued the aliens, and smote them as far as Beth-car"—the unfed smiting the fed, the unarmed the armed. These shall be the strengths of those who fast to God. Heaven fights for such men. You have a pattern of a defence necessary even for spiritual wars. So, when Sennacherib king of the Assyrians, after many cities were already taken, was levelling blasphemies and threats at Israel through Rabshakeh, nothing else turned him from his purpose toward Ethiopia. And after that, what else but the humiliation of king Hezekiah consumed by an angel a hundred and eighty-four thousand of his army? For when the harshness of the enemy was announced, he rent his garment, put on sackcloth, and in the same habit bade the elders of the priests go to God through Isaiah—fasting, of course, accompanying their prayers. For there is no time for food in peril, nor any care of fullness under sackcloth. Always is fasting the sequel of mourning, as feasting is the accession of surfeit. Through this sequel of mourning and through abstinence, even that sinful city Nineveh is delivered from the destruction foretold. For its penitence for its crimes had sufficiently commended fasting, undertaken for three days, even the cattle being starved, with whom God was not angry. Sodom too and Gomorrah would have escaped, had they fasted. Ahab too recognized this remedy. When, after his transgression and idolatry and the slaying of Naboth for his vineyard's sake at Jezebel's instigation, Elijah had reproached him—"As you have killed and taken possession of the inheritance: in the place where the dogs licked the blood of Naboth, they shall lick yours also"—he abased himself and put sackcloth on his flesh and fasted and slept in sackcloth. And then the word of the Lord came to Elijah: "Have you seen how Ahab has reverenced before My face? Because he has reverenced, I will not bring the calamity in his own days, but in the days of his son I will bring it"—a son who was not going to fast. So fasting is a work of reverence toward God, through which Hannah too, the wife of Elkanah, formerly barren, in her longing easily obtained from God to fill with a son the belly emptied of food—and a son who was a prophet. But fasting will earn from God not only the changing of nature, or the averting of dangers, or the blotting out of transgressions, but even the recognition of mysteries. Look at the example of Daniel. About the dream of the king of Babylon all the wise men are troubled, and freely confess that it cannot be known by human excellence. Daniel alone, trusting in God and knowing what would serve to merit God's grace, demands a space of three days, fasts with his brotherhood, and so, his prayers being commended, is fully instructed in both the order and the meaning of the dream; the tyrant's wise men are spared, God is glorified, Daniel is honoured—and one who afterward, too, was to bring God no smaller grace, in the first year of king Darius, when, from reconsidering the times foretold by Jeremiah, "he set his face to God in fastings and sackcloth and ashes." For the angel sent to him at once professed this cause of the divine condescension: "I am come," he says, "to show you—inasmuch as you are a man to be pitied," by fasting, that is. If he was pitiable to God, he had been horrible to the lions in the den, where indeed an angel furnished a dinner for him as he fasted six days.

We give the rest also. For now we hasten on to new proofs. On the threshold of the Gospel, Anna the prophetess, daughter of Phanuel, who both knew the infant Lord and prophesied many things about Him to those who awaited the redemption of Israel, after the distinguished title of an old and one-husbanded widowhood, is enriched by the testimony of fastings as well—showing in what offices it is fitting to attend upon the Church, and that by none is Christ better understood than by women once married and often fasting. The Lord Himself soon dedicated His own baptism—and in His own that of all—with fastings, though He was able to make loaves out of stones, and perhaps even to make Jordan run with wine, had He been such a glutton and wine-bibber. Nay, He was initiating the new man, in reproach of the old, by the virtue of disdaining food, that He might show him, to the devil who sought again to tempt Him by food, stronger by an entire fast. He prescribed thenceforth a law for fasts: that they be carried through without sadness. For why should that be sad which is salutary? He taught also that against the fiercer demons one must battle by fastings. For what wonder, if the wicked spirit is driven out by the same working by which the holy is brought in? In short, when the favour of the Holy Spirit, together with the charisma of prophecy besides, had hastened upon the centurion Cornelius, not yet baptized, we read that his fastings were heard. And I think the Apostle too in the second to the Corinthians, among his labours and perils and discomforts, after hunger and thirst, reckons "many fastings" as well.

This principal species in the chastening of diet can now prejudge also concerning the interior workings of abstinence, that they too are useful or necessary in their measure. For the exception of certain foods is a partial fast. Let us inspect, then, also the novelty or vanity of Xerophagies—whether in these too there is not a working of a religion as ancient as it is effective. I return to Daniel and his brethren, preferring the food of pulse and the drink of water to royal dishes and wine-jars, and thereafter the comelier for it—lest anyone fear even for the appearance of his poor little body—being moreover cultivated in spirit besides. "For God gave the youths knowledge and understanding in all literature, and Daniel in every word and in dreams and in all wisdom," by which he should relish this very thing too: by what means the recognition of mysteries might be obtained from God. At last, in the third year of Cyrus king of the Persians, when he had fallen into a reconsidering of the vision, he looked toward another form of humiliation. "In those days," he says, "I, Daniel, was mourning for three weeks; I ate no pleasant bread, flesh and wine entered not into my mouth, I was not anointed with oil, until the three weeks were fulfilled." When these had passed, an angel was sent, addressing him thus: "Daniel, you are a man to be pitied; fear not, for from the first day on which you gave your soul to reconsidering and to humiliation before God, your word was heard, and I have come in by your word." So the pity and humiliation of Xerophagies expel fear and turn the ears of God and make us sharers of hidden things. I return also to Elijah. When the ravens had been wont to satisfy him with bread and flesh, why was it that afterward, at Beersheba of Judaea, when he was roused from sleep, that certain angel offered him doubtless bread alone and water? Had the ravens failed, who might feed him more liberally? Or was it hard for the angel to snatch some attendant from somewhere out of the king's banquet, with a most lavishly furnished dish, and convey him to Elijah—as for Daniel hungering in the lions' den the dinner of the reapers was displayed? But it was needful to set up an example teaching that in a time of pressure and persecution and any kind of circumstance one must live on Xerophagies. With such a diet David expressed his confession—eating ashes indeed for bread, that is, bread like dry and squalid ashes, and mingling his drink with weeping, doubtless in place of wine. For abstinence from wine too has its own claims, which had both vowed Samuel to God and consecrated Aaron. For of Samuel his mother says: "And he shall drink no wine and no strong drink"—for she herself prayed to God in this manner. And the Lord to Aaron: "Wine and strong drink you shall not drink, you and your sons after you, whenever you enter the tabernacle, or go up to the altar, and you shall not die." So surely shall those die who minister in the church not sober. So too He reproaches Israel His neighbour: "And you gave wine to drink to My consecrated ones." And this restriction of drink too is a portion of Xerophagy. Though wherever abstinence from wine is either exacted by God or vowed by man, there let it be understood that the constraint of food too lays a foundation, prescribing the form for drink. For as the eating, so the drinking. It is not likely that anyone should sacrifice half his gullet to God, sober in his draughts and drunken in his food. And whether the Apostle too knew Xerophagies—he who had celebrated greater things, thirst and hunger and "many fastings," who had refused "drunkennesses and revellings"—the case of his disciple Timothy is proof enough; for, advising him to use a little wine on account of his stomach and his frequent infirmities, from which Timothy abstained not by institution but by devotion (though custom would rather have profited his stomach), by this very thing the Apostle commended abstinence from wine as worthy of God, which he dissuaded only out of necessity.

Likewise they accuse our Stations as "appointed," and some indeed as "set even toward evening," under the name of novelty, saying that this office too is to be undertaken by choice and not to be prolonged beyond the ninth hour—after their own custom, of course. But as for what pertains to the question of appointment, I will answer once for all causes. Now to the proper point of this species: I speak of the manner of the time, and on this they first must be challenged—whence they prescribe this form of breaking off the Stations at the ninth hour. If it is because Peter and those with him are read to have entered the temple at the ninth hour of prayer, who will prove to me that they performed a Station that day, so that one should interpret the ninth hour as the close and discharge of a Station? Indeed you might more easily find that Peter, at the sixth hour, for the purpose of taking food, had first gone up to the upper room to pray—so that this office may rather be ended at the sixth hour of the day, which seemed about to be discharged after the prayer. Moreover, since in the same memoir of Luke the third hour also of prayer is shown, under which those initiated by the Holy Spirit were held for drunken, and the sixth, at which Peter went up to the upper room, and the ninth, at which they entered the temple—why should we not understand that, while clearly the indifference is preserved that one must pray always and everywhere and at every time, yet those three hours, as the more notable in human affairs, which divide the day, which mark off business, which resound publicly, were likewise the more solemn in divine prayers? Which Daniel's case too persuades, who prayed three times a day—surely with the exception of certain hours, and none other than the more notable, thence the apostolic ones, the third, the sixth, the ninth. Hence, then, I will say that Peter too, from the older usage rather, observed the ninth, praying at the third for the office of the supreme prayer. But this is for the sake of those who think they act after the form of Peter, which they know not—not as though we spurned the ninth, which we very often observe both on the fourth and the sixth of the week, but because, of those things which are observed from tradition, we ought to bring the more worthy reason the more they lack the authority of Scripture, until they be either confirmed or corrected by some heavenly charisma. "And if in anything you are ignorant," it says, "the Lord will reveal it to you." So, the Paraclete being set aside as the confirmer of all these things, the leader of all truth, inquire whether a worthier reason is brought by us for observing the ninth—so that to Peter too that reason should be reckoned, if he then performed a Station. For it comes from the Lord's departure; and although this ought always to be commemorated without distinction of hours, yet more impressively then are we bound to it, according to the very name of Station. For soldiers too, never unmindful of their oath, the more obey their Stations. And so the pressure is to be celebrated up to that hour at which, the world being darkened from the sixth hour, it performed its mournful office at the Lord's death—that then we too may return to gladness, when the world also received its brightness. If this savours more of the Christian religion, since it the more celebrates the glory of Christ, I can equally fix the standing of a later Station from the same order of the matter, that we fast till evening, awaiting the time of the Lord's burial, when Joseph took down the body he had begged and laid it away. Hence it is even irreligious to refresh the flesh of servants before that of the Lord. But let me have ventured these things thus far out of the provocation of argumentations, repelling conjectures with conjectures—yet, I think, with more faithful ones. Let us see whether anything of the kind supports us from the antiquities too. In Exodus, was not that posture of Moses against Amalek, fighting by prayers and persevering until sundown, a late Station? Do we suppose that Joshua, son of Nun, dined that day on which he defeated the Amorites, when he laid a Station upon the very elements? "The sun stood still at Gibeon and the moon in Aijalon; the sun and moon stood in their station, until the people were avenged of their enemies, and the sun stood in mid-heaven." And as it came on toward evening and the end of that one day, there was no such day before it or after, so prolonged that, as it says, "God heard a man"—a man, that is, peer of the sun, persisting so long in his office—a Station longer even than a late one. Certainly Saul too, himself set in battle, manifestly proclaimed this office: "Cursed be the man who shall eat bread until evening, until I am avenged of my enemy"—and his whole people tasted not, while all the land was dining. And God granted so great an authority to the edict of that Station, that Jonathan, son of Saul, though ignorant of the fast appointed till evening, had admitted a taste of honey, and was soon by lot convicted of the transgression, and scarcely by the people's prayer rescued from peril. For he had been guilty of gluttony, though innocent. But Daniel too, in the first year of king Darius, when fasting in sackcloth and ashes he was making confession to God, says: "And while I was still speaking in prayer, behold, the man whom I had seen in the dream at the first, flying swiftly, drew near to me about the hour of the evening sacrifice." This shall be the late Station, which, fasting till evening, sacrifices to God a richer prayer.

But all these things, I believe, are unknown to those who are troubled by our practices—or perhaps known only by reading and not by attention as well—according to the greater force of the ignorant among that most glorious multitude, forsooth, of the Psychics. Therefore we have directed our argument through the several species of fasts, Xerophagies, Stations, that, while we review according to the equipment of both Testaments how much profit lies in the offices of food refused or cut down or delayed, we may beat back those who weaken these as if empty; and likewise, while we show in what rank they have always stood in religion, we may refute those who accuse these as novelties. For neither is that new which has always been, nor empty which is useful. But this too lies in the middle: that certain of these offices, commanded by God to man, established a law, while certain, offered by man to God, discharged a vow. Yet a vow too, when it has been accepted by God, makes a law for the future through the authority of the Acceptor; for thenceforth He who has approved the deed has commanded it to be done. And so here too, in another species, the wrangle of the contrary party is brought in, when they say: "It is either false prophecy, if a spiritual voice has established these solemnities, or heresy, if human presumption has devised them." For in reprehending that form by which the old usages too ran their course, and in twisting from it those things which the adversaries of the old can in turn retract against them, they will be obliged either to refuse those also or to undertake these now displayed—necessarily, especially since these too, by whatever founder they are, whether spiritual or merely faithful, run to the same God to whom the old also run. For undoubtedly both heresy and false prophecy will be judged among us, all of us champions of the one God the Creator and of His Christ, by diversity of divinity; and so I defend this side indifferently, offering them on what footing they will to plant a stand. "It is the spirit of the devil," you say, O Psychic. And how does it enjoin the offices of our God, to be offered to none but our God? Either contend that the devil acts together with our God, or let Satan be reckoned the Paraclete. But you affirm him a man, an antichrist; for by this name are heretics called in John. And how has any such, in our Christ, ordered these offices toward our Lord, when the antichrists too have gone forth against our Christ in their dealings toward God? On which side, then, do you suppose the spirit confirmed among us is established—when it commands, or when it approves the things which our God has both always commanded and approved? But again you fix boundary-stakes for God, as concerning grace, so concerning discipline; as concerning charismata, so concerning solemnities—as though His offices had ceased likewise as His benefits, and so you deny that He still imposes duties, because here too "the Law and the prophets were until John." It remains that you take away the whole, inasmuch as in you it is so idle.

For now in this species too, enriched and sated, you reign—not assailed by transgressions, which fasts would file away; nor needing the knowledge of revelations, which Xerophagies would wrest out; nor fearing wars of your own, which Stations would shake off. Even if from John the Paraclete had fallen silent, we should ourselves have stood forth as prophets to ourselves for this cause above all—not now, I say, for entreating the wrath of God, nor for obtaining His protection or grace, but for fortifying through our very selves the condition of the last times, proclaiming all "lowliness of mind," since the prison must be learned by heart, and hunger and thirst exercised, and the endurance both of fasting and of an anxious diet taken up—so that the Christian may enter into prison such as he would have come forth from it, there to suffer not a penalty but a discipline, not the torments of the age but his own offices, and so the more confidently to proceed to the contest from custody, having abused nothing of the flesh, so that the torments may not even have material—since he is mailed with skin alone and dry, and horny against the claws, the sap of his blood already sent on ahead as it were the encumbrances of the soul, which itself now hastens on, the soul which, often fasting already, has come to know death at close hand. Plainly it is your way to set out cook-shops in the prisons for martyrs of doubtful resolve, lest they should miss their custom, lest they should weary of life, lest they should be scandalized at the new discipline of abstinence—which not even that Pristinus of yours, no Christian martyr, had touched; whom, after he had for some while been crammed by leave of a free custody—with all baths as though they were a better baptism, and all the retreats of luxury as though they were the more secret places of the Church, and all the allurements of this life as though they were worthier than those of the eternal—pledged, I suppose, to this, that he should be unwilling to die; whom at last, on the very day of the tribunal, you so enervated, having drugged him beforehand with strong wine of the finest as though with an antidote, that, tickled by a few claws (for so much only did his drunkenness feel), he could no longer answer the president who asked him whom he confessed for Lord, and thus, racked now of this, when he had nothing but sobs and belchings, he departed in the very act of denial. Therefore those who preach the discipline of sobriety are false prophets; therefore those who observe it are heretics! Why then do you delay to believe the Paraclete—whom you deny in Montanus, in Apicius?

You lay down as a rule that the solemnities of this faith have been established by the Scriptures or by the tradition of our forefathers, and that nothing further of observance is to be added, on account of the unlawfulness of innovation. Stand on that footing, if you can. For behold, I confront you, both fasting besides the Passover, apart from those days in which the Bridegroom was taken away, and interposing the half-fasts of Stations, and you yourselves now and then living on bread and water, as has seemed good to each. In short, you answer that these things are to be done by choice, not by command. You have therefore moved your footing in exceeding the tradition, since you undertake things that are not established. But what kind of thing is it, that you permit by your own choice what you do not grant to the command of God? Shall more be lawful to human will than to divine power? I remember that I am free toward the age, not toward God. So it is mine to do a service to the Lord of my own accord; so it is His to enjoin. Not only do I owe Him obedience, but flattery as well; for the one I render to His command, the other to my own choice. But it is well that the bishops too are wont to enjoin fasts upon the whole people—I do not say with the design of collecting alms, as is your gain, but sometimes also from some cause of ecclesiastical solicitude. And so, if even by the edict of a man and all together you practise "lowliness of mind," how do you brand in us the very unity of fasts and Xerophagies and Stations?—unless perhaps we transgress against decrees of the senate and mandates of princes, set against assemblies. The Holy Spirit, when in whatever lands He willed and through whomsoever He willed He was preaching, out of His providence of impending trials—whether of the Church or of worldly calamities—inasmuch as He is the Paraclete, that is, the advocate to entreat the Judge, enjoined the remedies of such offices: now, for instance, for exercising the discipline of sobriety and abstinence. We who receive Him necessarily observe also the things which He then established. Look at the Jewish calendar, and you will find nothing new, since whatever was enjoined upon the fathers all subsequent posterity guards with hereditary religion. Moreover, throughout the Greek provinces those councils are held in certain places, drawn from all the churches, through which both whatever loftier matters are handled in common, and the very representation of the whole Christian name is celebrated with great veneration. And how worthy it is, under the auspices of faith, to gather together from everywhere unto Christ! "See how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell in unity!" This psalm you do not easily know how to chant, save at the time when you sup with a crowd. But those assemblies, having first laboured with Stations and fastings, know how "to grieve with them that grieve," and so at last "to rejoice with them that rejoice." If we too, in the various provinces, discharge these solemnities, to which a present discourse then gave patronage, represented mutually in the spirit, it is the law of the mystery.

We, then, observing seasons and days and months and years, are "Galatianized." Plainly—if we are observers of Jewish ceremonies, of legal solemnities; for those the Apostle unteaches, restraining the perseverance of the Old Testament buried in Christ, and establishing the New. But if there be a new condition in Christ, the solemnities too will have to be new; or, if the Apostle erased every devotion of seasons and days and months and years altogether, why do we celebrate the Passover by an annual cycle in the first month? Why thereafter do we run through fifty days in all exultation? Why do we devote the fourth and sixth of the week to Stations and the Preparation to fastings? Although you also sometimes continue the Sabbath—a day never to be fasted on except at the Passover, according to the reason rendered elsewhere. To us, certainly, every day is celebrated, even by a common consecration. There is, then, no reason of difference with the Apostle, distinguishing the new from the old. But here too your inequality will be laughed at, when you reproach us with the form of antiquities in the very matter wherein you accuse us of the cause of novelty.

He reprobates also those who command to abstain from foods—but out of the providence of the Holy Spirit, condemning beforehand the heretics who would enjoin a perpetual abstinence to destroy and despise the works of the Creator: such as I shall find in Marcion, in Tatian, in Jupiter, the heretic of today after Pythagoras—not in the Paraclete. For how slight, with us, is the prohibition of foods? Two weeks of Xerophagies in the year—and not whole ones, the Sabbaths and Lord's days being of course excepted—we offer to God, abstaining from those things which we do not reject but defer. And yet, writing to the Romans, he now pricks you, the carpers at this office: "Do not for food's sake," he says, "destroy the work of God." What work? Of which he says, "It is good not to eat flesh and not to drink wine. For he who serves in these things is pleasing and propitiable to our God. One believes that all things may be eaten; but another, who is weak, eats herbs. Let him who eats not nullify him who eats not. Who are you, that you judge another's servant? Both he who eats and he who eats not give thanks to God." Now when he forbids that a controversy be made of human choice, how much more of divine? So he knew that some chastisers and prohibitors of diet are blamed—those who abstain out of disgust, not out of duty; but that those are approved who abstain in honour, not in reproach, of the Creator. And though he handed you the keys of the shambles, permitting all things to be eaten, only to establish the exception of things offered to idols, yet he did not enclose the kingdom of God in the shambles: "For," he says, "the kingdom of God is not eating or drinking"; and, "Food does not commend us to God"—not that you should think this said of dry food, but rather of rich and elaborate, since, subjoining, "Neither if we eat shall we abound, nor if we eat not shall we fall short," he sounds rather against you, who reckon that you abound if you eat and fall short if you eat not, and therefore disparage these things. The Lord too, how unworthily do you interpret to your lust as eating and drinking everywhere—but, I think, He also fasted, who pronounced blessed not the satisfied but the hungering and the thirsting; who professed a food, not such as the disciples supposed, but the perfection of His Father's work, teaching men "to work for the food which abides unto life eternal," and in the ordinary prayer too commanding "bread" to be asked, and not the riches of an Attalus. So Isaiah too did not deny that God had chosen a fast, but enumerated what kind He had not chosen. "For in the days of your fasts," he says, "your own wills are found, and you harass all who are subject to you; or you fast for strifes and quarrels, and smite with fists. Not such a fast have I chosen"—but such as he subjoined; and in subjoining it he did not take away the fast, but confirmed it.

For even if He prefers the works of righteousness, yet not without the sacrifice which is the soul afflicted by fastings. That God, certainly, whom neither a people incontinent of gluttony pleased, nor a priest, nor a prophet. There remain still the monuments of concupiscence, where was buried the people most greedy of flesh, to the very vomiting up of the quails through surfeit. The elder Eli is dashed down before the doors of the temple, his sons fall in the battle-line, his daughter-in-law expires in childbirth. For this plague that shameless house had earned from God—a house that defrauded the carnal sacrifices. Shemaiah, the man of God, when he had prophesied the destruction of the idolatry introduced by king Jeroboam, after that king's hand was withered and at once restored, after the altar was riven—being invited by the king for these signs to take refreshment, plainly excused himself (for he had been forbidden by God) from touching food at all there; but, being soon rashly fed by another old man who lied as to being a prophet, according to the word of God then made over the table, he was not buried in his father's tomb. For, struck down by the meeting of a lion in the way and buried among strangers, he paid the penalty of the deserted fast. These shall be examples both to the people and to bishops, even spiritual ones, if they admit any incontinence of gluttony. But not even among those below has the admonition ceased, where in the rich glutton the banquets are tormented, while in the poor man the fastings are refreshed, having Moses and the prophets for teachers. For Joel too cried out, "Sanctify a fast and a treatment," foreseeing even then that other apostles and prophets too would sanctify a fast and proclaim offices that treat God. Whence those who fawn upon their idols in adorning and decking them and saluting them at every hour are said "to make a treatment." But all "lowliness of mind" even the heathen acknowledge. When the heaven is stunned and the year is dry, barefoot processions are proclaimed, the magistrates lay aside their purples, turn back their fasces, intone a prayer, renew a sacrifice. Among certain colonies, moreover, by an annual rite, veiled in sackcloth and sprinkled with ashes, they cast a suppliant odium upon their idols; the baths and taverns are shut until the ninth hour. There is one fire in public at the altars, no water even in the basins. A Ninevite cessation, I believe. The Jewish fast, certainly, is celebrated everywhere, when, the temples being left aside, along every shore at last they sometimes send up a prayer to heaven in the open. And though by the garb and adornment of mourning they defame the duty, yet they affect the faith of abstinence and sigh for the authority of the lingering star. But it is well that you, hurling blasphemies at our Xerophagies, equate them with the chaste rites of Isis and Cybele. I admit the testimonial comparison. Hence it will be established as divine, since the devil, the rival of things divine, imitates it. From truth a lie is constructed, from religion a superstition is compounded. Hence you are the more irreligious, the more the heathen is the readier. He, in short, slaughters his gullet to God in his idol; you will not to God. For your god is your belly, and your lung is your temple, and your paunch is your altar, and your priest is the cook, and the Holy Spirit is the steam, and the seasonings are the charismata, and your belching is the prophecy.

You are old, if we will speak the truth—you who so indulge your gullet, and you deservedly boast yourself the elder; I always recognize the savour of Esau the hunter of wild beasts; so everywhere you are eager to track down thrushes, so you come from the field of your most lax discipline, so you fail in spirit. If I offer you a lentil-pottage reddened with boiled-down must, at once you will sell all your birthrights; with you the love-feast boils in the cooking-pots, faith grows warm in the kitchens, hope lies in the dishes. But of greater account is your love-feast, because by it your young men sleep with their sisters. Wantonness and luxury are, forsooth, the appendages of gluttony. This fellowship the Apostle too knew, when, having premised, "Not in drunkennesses nor in revellings," he added, "Nor in chamberings and lusts." It belongs to the eulogy of your gluttony, that a double honour is reckoned among you for your presidents in the form of double portions, whereas the Apostle gave a double honour as to both brethren and presidents. Who among you is holier, unless he is more frequent at banqueting, more sumptuous at catering, better furnished with cups? Deservedly do you, men of soul and flesh only, refuse the things of the spirit. If the prophets pleased such as you, they were not mine. Why, then, do you not steadfastly proclaim, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die"?—just as we do not hesitate plainly to enjoin, "Let us fast, brothers and sisters, lest tomorrow perhaps we die." Let us openly vindicate our disciplines. We are certain that "they who are in the flesh cannot please God"—not, indeed, in the substance of the flesh, but in its care, in its affection, in its working, in its will. Leanness does not displease us; for God did not bestow the flesh by weight, just as He did not bestow the spirit by measure. More easily, it may be, will the leaner flesh enter through the narrow gate of salvation; the lighter flesh will be the sooner raised again; the drier flesh will the longer endure in the sepulchre. Let the boxers and the Olympic pugilists be fattened: to them belongs the ambition of the body, for whom strength too is necessary—and yet even they grow strong by Xerophagies. But ours are other strengths and other forces, just as ours are other contests, in which the wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers of the world, against the spiritual things of wickedness. Against these we must stand not with flesh and blood, but with faith and a robust spirit. For the rest, the fattened Christian will perhaps be more necessary to bears and lions than to God—except that even against the beasts he will have to practise leanness.