Against Celsus 7.63

To this too we must say that, even if the Scythians, the Nomads of Libya, and the Seres, whom Celsus calls godless, and other nations most unholy and lawless, and the Persians too, cannot bear to see temples and altars and images, it does not follow that their not bearing these things is the same as our not bearing them. For the doctrines must be examined from which those who cannot bear temples and images start, so that the one who cannot bear them may be praised if he refuses from sound doctrines, and blamed if from mistaken ones. For the same thing can arise from different doctrines. For example, those who follow the philosophy of Zeno of Citium avoid adultery, and so do those who follow Epicurus, and some of the wholly uneducated too. But see how much disagreement there is among so many about avoiding adultery. The first avoid it because it is against the common good and against the nature of a rational being to corrupt a woman who by law already belongs to another and to ruin another man's household; the followers of Epicurus, when they refrain from adultery, do not refrain for this reason, but because they have taken pleasure as the end, and many things hindering pleasure befall one who gives way to the single pleasure of adultery, sometimes imprisonment or death, and often, before these, dangers in watching for the husband to leave the house and for those who take his side; so that if, supposedly, an adulterer could escape the notice of the woman's husband, all his household, and those in whose eyes one is disgraced by adultery, the Epicurean would commit adultery for the sake of pleasure. And if the uneducated man also sometimes does not commit adultery when he could, he would sometimes be found not committing adultery because of the fear arising from the law and its punishments, and such a man would not be refraining from adultery in order to hunt for greater pleasures. You see, then, that what is thought to be one act, abstention from adultery, is not the same but different according to the purposes of those who abstain; for it comes either from sound doctrines, or from wicked and most impious ones, like those of the Epicurean or of such an uneducated man.