City of God (Penguin Classics), page 53
We are commanded to love this Good with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength; and to this Good we must be led by those who love us, and to it we must lead those whom we love. Thus are fulfilled those two commands on which ‘all the Law and the prophets depend’: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’, and, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’14 For in order that a man may know how to love himself an end has been established for him to which he is to refer all his action, so that he may attain to bliss. For if a man loves himself, his one wish is to achieve blessedness. Now this end is ‘to cling to God’.15 Thus, if a man knows how to love himself, the commandment to love his neighbour bids him to do all he can to bring his neighbour to love God. This is the worship of God; this is true religion; this is the right kind of devotion; this is the service which is owed to God alone.
Therefore every immortal Power, however great its importance, will have no other wish, if it loves us as itself, than that we, for our happiness, should be subjected to God, seeing that it is such subjection that gives that Power its blessedness. If it does not worship God, it is wretched, because deprived of God; if it worships God, it will not wish itself to be worshipped in the place of God. Far from that, it will subscribe to the statement in Scripture, ‘He who sacrifices to gods, and not to the Lord alone, will be extirpated.’16 This saying it will approve with all the strength of its love.
4. Sacrifice due only to God
For, to say nothing of other acts of religious obedience performed in the worship of God, at least no one would dare to assert that sacrifice is due to any other being than God. There are in fact many ingredients in the worship of God which are also found in the honour paid to human beings, in a spirit either of humility or of noisome flattery; but even when men are said to be worthy of homage and veneration, and even, in extreme cases, of adoration, it is remembered that they are still human beings. But who has ever thought it right to offer sacrifice, except to a being known, or supposed, or imagined to be God? The antiquity of the worship of God by means of sacrifice is sufficiently proved by the story of Cain and Abel, the two brothers, where God rejected the sacrifice of the elder, and viewed with favour that of the younger brother.17
5. God does not require sacrifices, but he wishes them to be offered as symbols of what he does require
Could anyone be such a fool as to suppose that the sacrificial offerings are necessary to God – that they are of any use to him? There are many passages in holy Scripture to witness this point; but it will be enough to cut a long story short by quoting a short extract from one of the psalms: ‘I said to the Lord, “You are my God, for you have no need of my possessions.” ’18 Thus, far from needing any cattle, or any other corruptible and earthly thing, we must believe that God does not need even the righteousness of man; and that it is man, not God, who is benefited by all the worship which is rightly offered to God. For no one is going to say that he does any service to a spring by drinking from it, or to the light by beholding it. If in times gone by our ancestors offered other sacrifices to God, in the shape of animal victims (sacrifices which the people of God now read about, but do not perform) we are to understand that the significance of those acts was precisely the same as that of those now performed amongst us – the intention of which is that we may cleave to God and seek the good of our neighbour for the same end. Thus the visible sacrifice is the sacrament, the sacred sign, of the invisible sacrifice. That is why the penitent in the prophet’s book, if it was not the prophet himself, seeks God’s forgiveness for his sins with these words, ‘If you had wished for sacrifice, I would certainly have given it: but you will not delight in holocausts. The sacrifice offered to God is a broken spirit; God will not despise a heart that is broken and humbled.’19
Observe how he says that God does not want sacrifice, and how in the same place, he shows that God does desire sacrifice. God does not want the sacrifice of a slaughtered animal, but he desires the sacrifice of a broken heart. That offering which, he says, God does not want, signifies the offering which, he adds, God does desire. When he says that God does not want sacrifices he means that he does not want them in the way supposed by the fools, namely for his own gratification. For if he had not wished the sacrifices he desires (and there is only one, the heart bruised and humbled in the sorrow of penitence) to be signified by those sacrifices which he was supposed to long for as if they gave him pleasure, then he would certainly not have prescribed their offering in the old Law. And the reason why they had to be changed, at the fitting and predestined time, was to prevent the belief that those things were objects of desire to God himself, or at least were acceptable gifts from us to him, and to make us realize that what God required was that which they signified. This is the message of another passage, from another psalm: ‘If I am hungry, I shall not tell you: for the whole earth, and all that is in it, belongs to me. Am I likely to eat the flesh of bulls, or to drink the blood of goats?’20 God is saying, in effect, ‘Had I needed such things, I certainly would not have applied to you for them, seeing that I have them in my power.’ The psalmist goes on to explain the meaning of sacrifice by adding, ‘Offer to God the sacrifice of praise, and fulfil your vows to the Most High. And call upon me in the day of tribulation and I shall rescue you; and you will glorify me.’
And there is another passage, in another prophet:
By what means shall I reach God, or take hold of my God, the most high? Shall I reach him with holocausts, with year-old calves? Will God be satisfied with thousands of rams or ten thousands of fat goats? What if I give the first-born of my impiety, the fruit of my belly for the sin of my soul? Have you been told, O man, what is good? Or what does the Lord require from you, except to practise justice, and to love mercy, and to be prepared to go with the Lord your God?21
In the words of this prophet the two things are distinguished, and it is made quite plain that God does not require, for their own sake, the sacrifices which signify the sacrifices that God does demand. In the epistle entitled To the Hebrews we read, ‘Do not forget to do good and to give to others: for it is with such sacrifices that God is pleased.’22 Hence the meaning of the text, ‘I desire mercy rather than sacrifice,’23 is simply that one sacrifice is preferred to another; for what is generally called sacrifice is really a sign of the true sacrifice. Mercy is, in fact, the true sacrifice; hence the text I have just quoted: ‘It is by such sacrifices that God is pleased.’
The instructions about the multifarious sacrifices in the service of the Tabernacle or the Temple are recorded in Scripture as divine commands. We see now that they are to be interpreted as symbolizing the love of God and the love of one’s neighbour. For ‘on these two commands the whole Law depends, and the Prophets.’24
6. The true and perfect sacrifice
Thus the true sacrifice is offered in every act which is designed to unite us to God in a holy fellowship, every act, that is, which is directed to that final Good which makes possible our true felicity. For that reason even an act of compassion itself is not a sacrifice, if it is not done for the sake of God. For sacrifice is a ‘divine matter’, in the phrase of the old Latin authors, even if it is performed or offered by man. Hence a man consecrated in the name of God, and vowed to God, is in himself a sacrifice inasmuch as he ‘dies to the world’ so that he may ‘live for God’.25 For this also is related to compassion, the compassion a man shows towards himself. Hence the text, ‘Have compassion on your own soul by making yourself acceptable to God.’26
Our body also is a sacrifice when we discipline it by temperance, provided that we do this as we ought for the sake of God, so that we may not offer our bodily powers to the service of sin as the instruments of iniquity, but to the service of God as the instruments of righteousness.27 The Apostle exhorts us to this, when he says, ‘I entreat you, brothers, by the compassion of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, as the reasonable homage you owe him.’28 If then the body, which the soul employs as a subordinate, like a servant or a tool, is a sacrifice, when it is offered to God for good and right employment, how much more does the soul itself become a sacrifice when it offers itself to God, so that it may be kindled by the fire of love and may lose the ‘form’ of worldly desire, and may be ‘re-formed’ by submission to God as to the unchangeable ‘form’, thus becoming acceptable to God because of what it has received from his beauty. This is what the Apostle says, when he adds, ‘And do not be “con-formed” to this age, but be “re-formed” in newness of mind, so that you may prove what is the will of God, namely, what is good, what is acceptable to God, what is perfect.’
So then, the true sacrifices are acts of compassion, whether towards ourselves or towards our neighbours, when they are directed towards God; and acts of compassion are intended to free us from misery and thus to bring us to happiness – which is only attained by that good of which it has been said, ‘As for me, my true good is to cling to God.’29 This being so, it immediately follows that the whole redeemed community, that is to say, the congregation and fellowship of the saints, is offered to God as a universal sacrifice, through the great Priest who offered himself in his suffering for us – so that we might be the body of so great a head – under ‘the form of a servant’.30 For it was this form he offered, and in this form he was offered, because it is under this form that he is the Mediator, in this form he is the Priest, in this form he is the Sacrifice. Thus the Apostle first exhorts us to offer our bothes as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, as the reasonable homage we owe him, and not to be ‘con-formed’ to this age, but to be ‘re-formed’ in newness of mind to prove what is the will of God – namely what is good what is acceptable to God, what is perfect, because we ourselves are that whole sacrifice. And after this exhortation, he continues,
Through the grace of God which has been given to me, I say this to all of you: Do not have greater notions of yourselves than you ought to have, but keep your notions under control, according to the measure of faith which God has imparted to each. For just as we have many members in one body, and all the members have not the same functions; so we are many, but we make up one body in Christ; and individually we are members of one another, possessing gifts differing according to the grace which has been given us.31
This is the sacrifice of Christians, who are ‘many, making up one body in Christ’. This is the sacrifice which the Church continually celebrates in the sacrament of the altar, a sacrament well-known to the faithful where it is shown to the Church that she herself is offered in the offering which she presents to God.
7. The holy angels, in their love for us, wish us to worship only the true God, not themselves
Those immortal and blessed beings, who are established in dwellings in heaven, rejoice together in participation in their creator, and find in his eternity their stability, in his truth their assurance, and from his bounty derive their holiness. They have such a compassionate love for us wretched mortals that their aim is for our immortality and blessedness; and therefore they wish us not to sacrifice to themselves, but to God, for they know that they themselves, together with us, are his sacrifice. For with us they make one City of God, which is addressed in the words of the psalm, ‘Most glorious things have been said about you, City of God.’32 Part of this City, the part which consists of us, is on pilgrimage; part of it, the part which consists of the angels, helps us on our way. It is from that City on high where the will of God is intelligible and unchangeable Law, it is from that supernal court (curia), so to speak, which has concern (cura) for us, it is from that community that the holy Scripture descended, brought to us by the ministry of angels,33 the Scripture in which we find the saying, ‘The man who sacrifices to gods, and not to the Lord only, will be extirpated.’34
This Scripture, this Law, the precepts of this kind, have been attested by such great miracles that it is abundantly clear to whom these immortal and blessed beings would have us offer sacrifice, these beings who wish for us the same blessings as for themselves.
8. The miracles performed through the ministry of angels to confirm the faith of God’s people
No doubt I shall be thought to be going too far back into the remote past if I recall the miracles which proved the truth of the promises which God made to Abraham thousands of years before, when he foretold that in Abraham’s seed all nations were to obtain a blessing. No one could fail to marvel that Abraham should have had a son born to him of a barren wife who had already reached an age when even a fertile woman would not be able to have any more children, and that in the sacrifice offered by Abraham a flame came from heaven and ran between the divided victims.35 Nor could they fail to marvel that to Abraham also was foretold by angels the burning of Sodom by fire sent from heaven, and that these angels, appearing in the likeness of men, were welcomed as guests by Abraham, who received from them the promises of God about the coming birth of a son, and that when the burning of Sodom was imminent, Lot, Abraham’s brother’s son, was miraculously rescued from the city by the same angels, and his wife was suddenly turned into salt when she looked back on the road – thus giving, in symbolic form, a warning that no one, having started on the way to liberation, should look back with regret at his past life.
Then there were all those tremendous miracles performed in Egypt through Moses, in the liberation of God’s people from the yoke of servitude, when the magicians of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, who was oppressing that people under his tyranny, were allowed to perform some miracles so that they might be overcome in an even more marvellous fashion! The magicians achieved their effects by the use of enchantments and magical spells, the specialities of evil angels, that is, of demons; but Moses wielded a power that was as much greater as his cause was more just, and he easily prevailed over them in the name of God, the creator of heaven and earth, with the assistance of the angels. In the end the magicians gave up the struggle at the third plague, and the plagues reached the final number of ten, in an ordered sequence of events, full of hidden meanings,36 carried out through the hand of Moses; and by those plagues the hard hearts of Pharaoh and the Egyptians were forced to yield and to allow God’s people to go free. They soon regretted this permission, and tried to catch up with the departing Hebrews; and then the sea divided to afford a dry crossing for the fugitives, but flowed back from each side to engulf and overwhelm their pursuers.
What am I to say of the repeated displays of the stupendous power of God in the miracles that accompanied the people’s passage through the desert? Water which had been undrinkable lost its bitterness when, at God’s instruction, a log of wood was flung into it; and it quenched the thirst of the parched Hebrews. Manna came from heaven when they were hungry; a limit was fixed for the amount to be collected, and any excess turned bad and produced maggots, though on the day before the Sabbath a double supply was collected, since collection was forbidden on the Sabbath, and none of that suffered any putrefaction. When the people longed for a meal of meat, and it seemed quite impossible to supply such a large multitude, their camp was filled with birds, and the ardour of their appetite was quenched by satiety and consequent disgust. When the enemy tried to oppose their passage, and gave battle, Moses prayed, with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross;37 and the enemy was crushed, without the loss of a single Hebrew. When a revolt broke out in the people of God, and some insurgents separated themselves from the divinely ordained community, the earth opened and swallowed them up alive – a visible token of invisible punishment. A rock, struck by a rod, poured out running water in abundance for so great a multitude. The fatal bites of snakes (a just punishment for the people’s sins) were cured by the sight of a brazen serpent erected on a wooden pole, and not only was relief brought to the afflicted people, but the destruction of death by a death was also signified by the image of crucified death. This serpent was preserved as a memorial of the miracle; but in later times the people went astray and began to worship it as an idol. And so King Hezekiah made devout use of his royal power in the service of God, and destroyed the image,38 thus winning great praise for his piety.
9. The unlawful practices of demon-worship, and the inconsistency of Porphyry, the Platonist
