Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 3 part 83/87

A certain young man was carried thither who, when at midday in the heat of summer he was washing his horse in a pool of the river, was seized by a demon. As he lay there, either near to death or most like a dead man, the mistress of the estate, according to custom, entered there for the evening hymns and prayers with her maidservants and certain consecrated women, and they began to sing hymns. At that voice he was, as it were, struck and roused, and with a terrible roaring he seized the altar and held it, not daring—or not being able—to move it, as though he had been bound or fastened to it, and with a great wailing, begging that he might be spared, he confessed where and when and how he had invaded the young man.

At last, declaring that it would go out, it named his several limbs, threatening that as it went it would cut them off, and amid these words it departed from the man. But his eye, slipping down upon his cheek, hung by a slender little vein as if from an inner root, and the whole middle of it, which had been blackish, had turned white. When those who were present saw this (for others too had run together, summoned by his cries, and had all cast themselves down in prayer for him), although they rejoiced that he stood in his right mind, yet again, on account of his eye, being grieved, they said that a physician must be sought. There the husband of his sister, who had carried him thither, said:

'God, who put the demon to flight at the prayers of His saints, is able to restore the sight.' Then, as best he could, he replaced the eye that had slipped down and was hanging, restored it to its place, and bound it with a kerchief, and thought it should not be unbound until after seven days. When he had done this, he found it perfectly sound. There others too were healed, of whom it would be tedious to tell. I know of a certain virgin of Hippo who, when she had anointed herself with oil into which the presbyter praying for her had let fall his tears, was at once healed of a demon. I know also that a bishop once prayed for a young man whom he did not see, and that he was straightway freed of a demon. There was a certain old man among us, Florentius of Hippo, a religious and poor man; he supported himself by the trade of a tailor;

he had lost his cloak and had not the means to buy himself another; to the Twenty Martyrs, whose shrine is most renowned among us, he prayed with a loud voice that he might be clothed. Some young men who happened to be there, scoffers, heard him, and as he departed they pursued him with mockery, as if he had begged from the martyrs fifty folles apiece to buy himself a garment. But he, walking on in silence, saw a great fish, cast up and still flapping, upon the shore, and with their applause and help he caught it, and sold it to a certain cook named Catosus, a good Christian, for the cook-shop, telling him what had happened, for three hundred folles, intending to buy wool with the money, so that his wife might make for him in some way something to wear.

But the cook, cutting up the fish, found a gold ring in its belly, and, moved at once by compassion and stricken with religious awe, restored it to the man, saying: 'Behold how the Twenty Martyrs have clothed you!' At the Waters of Tibilis, when the bishop Praeiectus was bringing relics of the most glorious martyr Stephen, a great multitude came thronging together to meet them. There a blind woman begged to be led to the bishop who was carrying them; she gave the flowers she was carrying, received them back, applied them to her eyes, and straightway saw. While those present were amazed, she went on ahead exulting, making her way and seeking no further any guide for the road.

The relics of the aforesaid martyr, which are placed in the fort of Sinitis, neighbouring to the colony of Hippo, Lucillus the bishop of that same place was carrying, with the people going before and following. A fistula, by whose affliction he had long been troubled and for which he was awaiting the hand of his most intimate physician to lance it, was suddenly healed by the carrying of that holy burden; for thereafter he no longer found it in his body. Eucharius is a presbyter from Spain, dwelling at Calama; he had long suffered from the old disease of the stone; through the relics of the aforesaid martyr, which the bishop Possidius brought thither, he was made whole. The same man afterward, when another disease prevailed, lay dead in such wise that his thumbs were already being bound together;

by the help of the aforesaid martyr, when something brought back from his shrine—namely the very presbyter's tunic—had been laid upon the body of him who lay there, he was raised up. There was there a man who was foremost in his rank, named Martialis, already heavy with age and greatly averse to the Christian religion. He had indeed a believing daughter and a son-in-law baptized that same year. When these, with many and great tears, begged him as he lay sick to become a Christian, he flatly refused and drove them from him with stormy indignation. It seemed good to his son-in-law to go to the shrine of holy Stephen and there to pray for him as much as he could, that God might give him a good mind, by which he should not delay to believe in Christ.

He did this with great groaning and weeping and with the sincerely burning affection of piety; then, departing, he took from the altar some flowers, whatever came to hand, and laid them at his head when it was already night; then he slept. And behold, before daybreak the old man cries out that someone should run to the bishop, who happened then to be with me at Hippo. So when he heard that he was absent, he asked that the presbyters should come. They came; he said that he believed, and, with all marvelling and rejoicing, he was baptized. This, as long as he lived, he had in his mouth: 'Christ, receive my spirit'—though he knew not that these were the last words of the most blessed Stephen when he was stoned by the Jews; words which were the last for this man also, for not long after he too departed this life.

There also, through the same martyr, two citizens were healed of gout, and one stranger: but the citizens entirely; the stranger, however, through a revelation, heard what he should apply when he was in pain; and when he did this, the pain at once subsided. Audurus is the name of an estate, where there is a church and in it a shrine of the martyr Stephen. A certain little boy, while he was playing in the courtyard, was crushed by a wheel as oxen drawing a wagon strayed from their path, and forthwith he quivered and breathed his last. His mother snatched him up and laid him at that same shrine, and not only did he come to life again, but he even appeared unharmed. A certain consecrated woman in a neighbouring estate, which is called Caspaliana, when she was struggling with sickness and was despaired of, had her tunic brought to that same shrine;

but before it could be brought back, she died. Nevertheless her parents covered her corpse with this tunic, and, her spirit being restored, she was made whole. At Hippo a certain Syrian named Bassus was praying at the shrine of the same martyr for his daughter who was sick and in danger, and had brought with him her garment, when behold, servants ran from the house to bring him word that she was dead. But when, as he was praying, they were intercepted by his friends, these forbade them to tell him, lest he should lament in public. When he had returned home, already resounding with the wailings of his household, and had cast over her the garment of his daughter which he was carrying, she was restored to life. Again, in the same place among us, the son of a certain Irenaeus, a tax-collector, was carried off by sickness.

And when the body lay lifeless, and the funeral rites were being prepared by those mourning and lamenting, one of his friends suggested, amid the words of others consoling him, that the body should be anointed with the oil of the same martyr. It was done, and he came to life again. Likewise among us a man of tribunician rank, Eleusinus, laid his infant son, lifeless from sickness, upon the shrine of the martyrs which is in his suburban estate, and after a prayer, which he poured forth there with many tears, he lifted him up alive. What shall I do? The promise of this work, which must be fulfilled, presses upon me, so that I cannot here record all the things I know; and beyond doubt very many of our people, when they read these things, will grieve that I have passed over so many which they assuredly know along with me.

These I now beg to pardon me, and to consider how great a labour of prolixity it would be to do what the necessity of the work I have undertaken compels me not to do here. For if I should wish to write only the miracles of healing—to say nothing of others—which have been wrought through this martyr, that is, the most glorious Stephen, in the colony of Calama and in our own, very many books would have to be composed, and yet not all could be gathered, but only those concerning which booklets were given to be read aloud among the people. For we wished this to be done, when we saw that signs of divine power similar to those of old were being repeated even in our times, and that they ought not to perish from the knowledge of the many.

Now it is not yet two years since this shrine began to be at Hippo Regius, and, though many—of which we are most certain—did not give in booklets concerning the things which have been wondrously done, those very booklets which were given had reached nearly the number of seventy when I wrote these things. At Calama, however, where both the shrine itself began earlier and they are given more frequently, they exceed that number by an incomparable multitude. At Uzalis too, a colony neighbouring to Utica, we have learned that many splendid things were done through the same martyr; whose shrine was established there by the bishop Evodius far earlier than among us. But the custom of giving booklets there does not exist—or rather did not exist; for perhaps now it has already begun to be.

For when we were lately there, we exhorted Petronia, a most illustrious woman, who had there been wondrously healed of a great and long-standing infirmity, in which all the aids of physicians had failed, that—the aforesaid bishop of the place willing it—she should give a booklet to be read aloud among the people, and she most obediently complied. In it she also set down something which I cannot here pass over in silence, although I am compelled to hasten on to those things which this work demands. She said that she had been persuaded by a certain Jew to insert a ring into a hair-cord, with which she should gird herself beneath every garment against the bare body; which ring should have under its gem a stone found in the kidneys of an ox. Bound with this as if with a remedy, she was coming to the threshold of the holy martyr.

But having set out from Carthage, when she had lodged at her own estate on the border of the river Bagrada, rising to continue her journey she saw that ring lying before her feet, and, marvelling, she tested the hair-cord with which it had been bound. When she found it altogether fastened, just as it was, with its firmest knots, she suspected that the ring had snapped and leapt off; but when this very ring too was found perfectly whole, she presumed that from so great a miracle she had received, in a certain way, a pledge of her future salvation, and, loosing that cord, she cast it together with the ring into the river. Let those not believe this who do not believe that the Lord of laws also was born through the unviolated parts of His virgin mother and entered to His disciples through closed doors;

but let them at least inquire into this, and, if they find it true, let them believe those things. She is a most illustrious woman, nobly born, nobly married, dwelling at Carthage; an ample city, an ample personage do not allow those seeking the matter to remain hidden. The martyr himself, certainly, by whose intercession she was healed, believed in the Son of the ever-virgin: he believed in Him who entered to the disciples through closed doors; finally—on account of which all these things are said by us—he believed in Him who ascended into heaven with the flesh in which He had risen; and therefore through him such great things are done, because for this faith he laid down his life. Even now, then, many miracles are wrought, the same God doing them through whom He will and as He will, who also did those things which we read of:

but these are neither made known in like manner, nor, that they may not slip from the mind, are they, like the gravel of memory, beaten in by frequent reading. For even where there is the diligence which has now begun to be among us, that the booklets of those who receive benefits should be read aloud among the people, those who are present hear this once, and the more numerous are not present; so that not even those who were present retain in mind, after some days, what they heard, and scarcely anyone of them is found who would report what he heard to one whom he had learned not to have been present. One thing has been done among us, not greater than those which I have told, but so clear and illustrious a miracle that I think there is no one of the people of Hippo who has not either seen or learned of it, no one who could by any means forget it.

There were certain ten brothers (of whom seven were males, three females) from Caesarea of Cappadocia, of no mean standing among their own citizens, who, by the curse of their mother—lately bereft by their father's death, who took most bitterly the wrong done her by them—were so chastised by divine punishment that they all were horribly shaken with a trembling of their limbs; and in this most loathsome condition, not bearing the eyes of their fellow-citizens, they wandered over almost the whole Roman world, wherever it seemed good to each to go. Of these, two also came to us, a brother and a sister, Paul and Palladia, already known in many other places, their misery noising it abroad.

Now they came about fifteen days before Easter; daily they frequented the church and in it the shrine of the most glorious Stephen, praying that God might now be appeased toward them and restore their former health. Both there and wherever they went, they turned upon themselves the gaze of the city. Some, who had seen them elsewhere and knew the cause of their trembling, made it known to others as best each could. And Easter came, and on the very Lord's Day in the morning, when a numerous crowd was already present and the young man, praying, was holding the railings of the holy place where the martyr's relics were, he was suddenly cast down and lay most like one sleeping, yet not trembling, as they used to do even in their sleep.

While those present were amazed, and some afraid, others grieving, when certain ones wished to raise him up, some forbade it and said that rather the outcome should be awaited. And behold, he arose, and he did not tremble, because he was healed, and he stood unimpaired, gazing upon those who gazed at him. Who, then, refrained from the praises of God? With the voices of those exclaiming and giving thanks the church was filled in every part. Thence they ran to me, where I was sitting, now about to come forth; one after another burst in, every later one announcing, as though it were news, what an earlier one had already told; and while I rejoiced and gave thanks to God within myself, he himself also enters with many others, bows down at my knees, is raised up to my kiss.

We proceed to the people; the church was full, it resounded with the voices of rejoicing: 'Thanks be to God! Praise be to God!'—no one keeping silence, those crying out on this side and on that. I greeted the people, and again they cried out with the same, even more fervent voice. When silence was at last made, the solemn lessons of the divine Scriptures were read. And when it came to the place for my sermon, I said a few words suited to the occasion and to the gladness of that joy. For I rather allowed them to consider, not to hear, a certain eloquence of God in the divine work. The man dined with us and diligently related to us the whole history of his own and his brother's and his mother's calamity. And so on the following day, after the sermon had been delivered, I promised that on the morrow the booklet of his narrative should be read aloud to the people.

When this was done, on the third day from the Lord's Day of Easter, on the steps of the apse from whose higher place I was speaking, I made both the brother and sister stand while their booklet was being read. The whole people of either sex gazed upon the one standing without unsightly motion, the other trembling in all her limbs. And those who had not seen him beheld, in his sister, what work of divine mercy had been wrought in him. For they saw what was to be rejoiced over in him, what was to be prayed for concerning her. When their booklet had been read, I bade them depart from the sight of the people, and I had begun to discourse somewhat more diligently upon the whole matter, when behold, as I was discoursing, other voices of new rejoicing are heard from the martyr's shrine.

Those who were listening to me turned thither and began to run together. For she, when she came down from the steps on which she had stood, had gone on to pray to the holy martyr; and as soon as she touched the railings, she likewise collapsed as if into sleep and rose up sound. While, therefore, we were inquiring what had happened, whence that joyful uproar had arisen, they entered with her into the basilica where we were, bringing her sound from the martyr's place. Then truly so great a cry of wonder arose from both sexes that the voice, continued with tears, seemed unable to be ended. She was led to the place where a little before she had stood trembling.

They exulted that she was now like her brother, over whom they had grieved that she had remained unlike, and they perceived that their prayers for her, not yet poured forth, yet already in the anticipating intention, had been so swiftly heard. They exulted in the praise of God with a voice without words, with so great a sound as our ears could scarcely bear. What was in the hearts of those exulting but the faith of Christ, for which the blood of Stephen was shed? CHAPTER IX. That all the miracles which are wrought through the martyrs in the name of Christ bear witness to that faith by which the martyrs believed in Christ. To what, if not to this faith, do these miracles bear witness, in which it is proclaimed that Christ rose again in the flesh and ascended into heaven with the flesh? For the martyrs themselves were martyrs of this faith,

that is, were witnesses of this faith; bearing witness to this faith they endured a most hostile and most cruel world, and overcame it not by fighting back but by dying; for this faith they died, who are able to obtain these things from the Lord for whose name they were slain; for this faith their wondrous patience went before, that in these miracles so great a power should follow. For if the resurrection of the flesh unto eternity either has not gone before in Christ or is not to come, as it is foretold by Christ or as it was foretold by the prophets by whom Christ was foretold: why can the dead do so great things, who were slain for that faith by which this resurrection is proclaimed?

For whether God Himself by His own self in that wondrous manner whereby, being eternal, He works temporal things, or whether He does these things through His ministers; and the very same things which He does through His ministers, whether He does some even through the spirits of the martyrs, as through men still established in the body, or whether He works all these things through the angels, whom He commands invisibly, incorporeally, immutably, so that the things which are said to be done through the martyrs are done by their only praying and obtaining, not also operating; or whether some things in these ways, some in those, which can in no way be comprehended by mortals: nevertheless these things bear witness to that faith in which the resurrection of the flesh unto eternity is proclaimed. CHAPTER X.

How much more worthily are the martyrs honoured, who obtain many wonders for this end, that the true God may be worshipped, than the demons, who do certain things for this end, that they themselves may be believed to be gods. Here perhaps they will say that their gods too have done certain wonders. Well and good, if they now begin to compare their gods to our dead men. Or will they say that they too have gods made of dead men, such as Hercules, such as Romulus, such as many others whom they suppose to have been received into the number of the gods? But to us the martyrs are not gods, because we know that the God both of us and of the martyrs is one and the same. Nor yet are the miracles which are wrought through the shrines of our martyrs in any way to be compared with the miracles which are reported to have been done through the temples of those gods.

But if any seem similar, then, just as the magicians of Pharaoh were vanquished by Moses, so were their gods vanquished by our martyrs. Now the demons did those things with that pride of impure haughtiness whereby they wished to be the gods of those people; but the martyrs do these things—or rather God does them, either with them cooperating or praying—that that faith may advance, by which we believe them to be not our gods, but to have one God together with us. In short, those people both built temples to such gods of theirs and set up altars, and instituted priests and offered sacrifices; but we build for our martyrs not temples as for gods, but memorial shrines as for dead men, whose spirits live with God;

nor do we there erect altars on which we might sacrifice to the martyrs, but to the one God both of the martyrs and our own; at which sacrifice, as men of God who overcame the world in His confession, they are named in their own place and order, yet are not invoked by the priest who sacrifices. For he sacrifices to God, not to them, although he sacrifices in their memorial, because he is a priest of God, not of theirs. But the sacrifice itself is the body of Christ, which is not offered to them, because they themselves are also this. To which, then, are they rather to be believed who work miracles? To those who wish themselves to be held as gods by those for whom they do these things, or to those who, that men may believe in God—which Christ also is—do whatever wonderful thing they do?

To those who wished their very crimes to be their sacred rites, or to those who do not wish even their own praises to be their sacred rites, but wish that all by which they are truly praised should redound to the glory of Him in whom they are praised? For in the Lord their souls are praised. Let us therefore believe those who both speak true things and do wondrous things. For by speaking true things they suffered, that they might be able to do wondrous things. Among those true things this is foremost, that Christ rose from the dead and was the first to show in His own flesh the immortality of the resurrection, which He promised should come to us either at the beginning of the new age or at the end of this one. CHAPTER XI. Against the Platonists, who argue from the natural weights of the elements that an earthly body cannot be in heaven.

Against this great gift of God, those reasoners—whose thoughts the Lord knows that they are vain—argue from the weights of the elements; namely, because, with Plato their master, they have learned that the two greatest and outermost bodies of the world, namely fire and earth, are coupled and joined together by two intermediate ones, that is, by air and water. And by this, they say, since earth is from here upward the first, water second above earth, air third above water, heaven fourth above air, an earthly body cannot be in heaven; for the several elements are balanced by their own weights, so that they may keep their order. Behold by what arguments human infirmity, possessed by vanity, contradicts the omnipotence of God.

What, then, do so many earthly bodies do in the air, since air is the third from earth? Unless perhaps He who, by the lightness of down and feathers, granted to the earthly bodies of birds that they should be borne in the air, will not be able to grant to the bodies of men, when made immortal, the power whereby they may be able to dwell even in the highest heaven. The earthly animals themselves, too, which cannot fly, among which are also men, ought, just like the fishes under water, which are the animals of the waters, to have lived likewise under earth. Why, then, does an earthly animal draw this life of his not even from the second, that is, from the waters, but from the third element?

Why is it that, since it belongs to earth, if it be compelled to live in the second element, which is above the earth, it is forthwith suffocated, and that it may live, lives in the third? Or does this order of the elements err here, or rather does it fail not in the nature of things, but in the arguments of these men? I forbear to say what I have already said in the thirteenth book—how many heavy earthly bodies there are, such as lead, which nevertheless receive a form from the craftsman whereby they are able to float upon water; and is it denied to the omnipotent Craftsman that the human body should receive a quality whereby it may be borne into heaven and be able to be in heaven?

Now indeed, against that which I said above, these men also, when they consider and treat the order of the elements in which they trust, find absolutely nothing to say. For thus is it from here upward: earth first, water second, air third, heaven fourth, so that above all is the nature of the soul. For Aristotle said it was a fifth body, and Plato none at all. If it were a fifth, it would certainly be higher than the rest; but since it is none, much more does it surpass all things. In an earthly body, then, what does it do? In this mass, what does it, which is subtler than all? In this weight, what does it, which is lighter than all? In this slowness, what does it, which is swifter than all?

Is it so, then, that by the merit of so excellent a nature it cannot be brought about that its body should be raised into heaven; and although the nature of earthly bodies can now press souls downward, will souls one day be unable to raise earthly bodies upward? Now if we come to their miracles, which, done by their gods, they set against our martyrs, will not even these themselves be found to make for us and to profit us altogether? For among the great miracles of their gods, surely that is a great one which Varro recounts: that a Vestal virgin, when she was in peril by a false suspicion of unchastity, filled a sieve with water from the Tiber and carried it to her judges without a single part of it dripping. Who held the weight of the water above the sieve?

Who has permitted nothing to fall from there onto the earth through so many gaping caverns? They will answer: 'Some god or some demon.' If a god, is he then greater than God, who made this world? If a demon, is he then more powerful than the angel who serves God, by whom the world was made? If, therefore, a lesser god, or an angel, or a demon could so suspend the weight of the watery element that the nature of the waters seems to have been changed, will then Almighty God, who created those very elements, be unable to take away the heavy weight from an earthly body, so that the body, once made alive, may dwell in that same element in which the life-giving spirit has willed it to dwell?

Next, since they place air in the middle between fire above and water below, how is it that we often find it between water and water, and between water and earth? For what do they suppose watery clouds to be, between which and the seas air is found in the middle? By what weight and order of the elements, I ask, does it come about that torrents, most violent and most surging, before they run beneath the air upon the earth, hang above the air in the clouds? Why, finally, is air the middle between the heights of heaven and the bare surface of the lands, in whatever direction the world extends, if its place is set between heaven and the waters, just as the waters' place is set between the air itself and the lands?