The Instructor 2.1.8

For are not these the people busy with dishes and the foolish elaborations of sauces, the base-minded and earthborn, pursuing the life of a day as if they would not live? The Holy Spirit pronounces them wretched through Isaiah, quietly withdrawing the name of love, since the feast was not according to reason: “But they made merry, slaughtering calves and sacrificing sheep, saying, Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” And that he counts such luxury as sin, he adds: “And this sin of yours shall not be forgiven until you die,” judging, not that senseless death is forgiveness of sin, but that death from salvation is the repayment of sin. “Do not delight in a little luxury,” says Wisdom. Here we must also mention the so-called things sacrificed to idols, and in what way we are commanded to abstain from them. Those things seem to me foul and abominable, over whose blood flit “the souls from Erebus of the dead who have died.” “For I do not want you to become partners of demons,” says the apostle, since the foods of the saved and of those who perish are different. We must abstain from them, then, not out of fear (for there is no power in them), but out of regard for our conscience, which is holy, and loathing the demons to whose names they are dedicated because of their foulness; and further, because of the weakness of those who take many things unsteadily, “whose conscience, being weak, is defiled.