Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 5 part 42/118

When this had been reported to me, and it was still unknown whither or by whom he had been seized, though there was nevertheless a suspicion concerning the man whom, fearing, he was protecting himself against through the church, I immediately sent to the tribune who is stationed to guard the shore. He sent soldiers; no one could be found. But in the morning we learned both in what house he had been, and that after cockcrow he had departed with the one who had held him. I sent there too, whither he was said to have been carried off. Where the aforesaid official, when found, was unwilling to allow the presbyter whom I had sent even to see him.

On another day I sent a letter asking that there be granted him what the emperor commanded in such cases, that is, that those who have been ordered to be produced be interrogated before the municipal records whether they wish to spend thirty days in that city under moderate custody, so as to set their affairs in order or prepare expenses—judging assuredly that within those very days we might perhaps be able to settle his cause by a friendly discussion. But now he has already set out and been led away with that official. But there is fear lest perhaps, when brought before the office of the consular, he should suffer some evil. For he has a case with a most wealthy man, although the integrity of the judge is proclaimed by a most illustrious reputation.

Yet lest money should in any way prevail at the office, I ask your Holiness, most beloved lord and venerable brother, that you would deign to deliver my letter to the honourable and to us most beloved consular, and to read these things to him: because I judged it not necessary to lay the same cause before him twice—namely, that he should defer the hearing of his cause, since I do not know whether in it he is guilty or innocent, and that, because the laws concerning this same man were not observed, so that he was thus seized and not, as the emperor commanded, brought before the municipal proceedings to be interrogated whether he would accept the benefit of the delay, he should not despise this, so that through it we may be able to settle the matter with his adversary. CXVI.

To his excellent lord, deservedly distinguished and in an honourable manner most beloved brother Generosus, Augustine sends greeting in the Lord. While the praise and proclamation of your administration and your illustrious fame greatly delight me, for the sake of the love which we owe to your merits and goodwill, never yet has my intercession been burdensome to your Excellency in requesting some favour, most beloved lord and venerable son. But now, when your Eminence has learned from the letters which I gave to my venerable brother and fellow-bishop Fortunatus what has been done in the city in which I serve the church of God, and by what necessity I was compelled to thrust my petition upon your occupations, your kindness will perceive clearly.

And assuredly you will do what befits not only an upright but also a Christian judge, with that disposition toward us which was surely to be presumed in the name of Christ. CXVII. To make a preface with you is not only superfluous but even troublesome, since you desire the matter, not words; and therefore I speak plainly. The old man Alypius, being asked by me rather often, had promised to reply, together with you, to a few little questions of dialogues; and since he is said to be in Mauretania even today, I beg with all my strength and ask that you alone would deign to reply—which you would without doubt have done even in the presence of your own brother. It is not money, not gold, that you would beyond doubt have given for any such thing if you had it; but now without labour you speak what I seek.

I could entreat you more, and through many dear to you, but I know your spirit, which desires not to be asked but to grant to all, provided only there be absent what is unseemly—of which in this matter there is utterly nothing unseemly. Yet whatever it is, I ask that you grant it to one about to sail. You know how most troublesome it is to me to be a burden—I do not say to your sincerity, but to anyone. But God alone knows in what manner, impelled by too great necessity, I have done this. For with you safe and with God favouring, I am about to sail; and you are not ignorant of the manners of men, who are prone to disparaging, and how, if one asked does not reply, he will be thought unlearned and dull, as you see. Therefore, I beseech you, reply to all things without hesitation, lest you dismiss me sorrowful;

so may I see my parents, since for this alone I sent Cerdo and await him alone. Brother Zenobius has been made master of the records and has sent us a warrant of conveyance with provisions. If I am not worthy that you should answer my little questions, at least let the provisions be feared. May the supreme Divinity keep you safe for us to a long age. Papas greets your worthiness most heartily. CXVIII. You have thought that I should be suddenly surrounded, or rather overwhelmed, by a throng of innumerable questions, even if you believed me at leisure and idle. For when could I, in any leisure whatever, dissolve so many knots of matters for one so hurrying and, as you write, now almost setting out?

For I should be hindered by the mere number of the matters themselves, even if the knots were easy to untie; but they are involved with such perplexity and bound with such tenacity that, even if they were few, occupying me who am most at leisure, they would with a great delay of time wear down my attention and wear away my nails. But I would rather snatch you from the midst of your dainty inquiries and cram you in among my cares, so that either you might learn not to be vainly curious, or you might not dare to impose your curiosity, to be fed and nourished, upon those among whose cares even the greatest care is to repress and rein in the curious.

For how much better and how much more fruitful it is, if any time and labour is to be spent in writing a letter to you, that it should rather be spent on this: that your empty and deceptive desires be pruned away — desires which must be guarded against all the more, the more easily they deceive, veiled and cloaked as they are under some shadow of respectability and under the name of liberal studies — than that by our service and, so to speak, our attendance they should be more vehemently stirred up into a mastery whereby they may crush that good mind of yours! For behold, if so many dialogues, once read, have helped you not at all toward seeing the goal and grasping the aim of all your actions, of what profit are they? Tell me.

For where you have set the goal of this whole most ardent zeal of yours — a zeal unfruitful to yourself and troublesome to us — your own letter sufficiently shows. For when you were pressing me by letter to solve the questions you had sent, you wrote thus: 「I could,」 you say, 「entreat you far more, and through many who are dear to you; but I know your temper, which does not wish to be begged, but rather to grant to all — provided only that nothing unbecoming be at stake, and in this matter there is absolutely nothing unbecoming. Yet whatever it be, I ask that you grant it to one about to sail.」 In these words of your letter you judge rightly of me, that I desire to grant to all, provided nothing unbecoming be at stake; but that in this matter there is nothing unbecoming does not seem so to me.

For it is no shameless surface of things that touches my perception when I consider a bishop, harassed and stretched taut amid the clamouring cares of the Church, suddenly, as though turning deaf, restraining himself from all these matters in order to expound to a single schoolman the petty problems of Cicero's dialogues. How unbecoming this is — although, swept along by the ardour of your studies, you are utterly unwilling to attend to it — you nevertheless feel yourself. For what else does this indicate: that when you had said that in this matter there was absolutely nothing unbecoming, you at once added, 「Yet whatever it be, I ask you to grant it to one about to sail」? For this amounts to saying that, while it seems to you indeed that there is nothing unbecoming in this matter, still, whatever of unbecomingness there is, you ask that I grant it to one about to sail.

But what is it, I ask you, that you added — 「about to sail」? Would I not owe you some measure of unbecomingness unless you were about to sail? Doubtless you suppose that unbecomingness is washed away by sea-water. But if that were so, then surely my own — for I am not about to sail — would remain unexpiated. You write, too, that I know how exceedingly irksome it is to you to be a burden to anyone, and you call God alone to witness that you have done this driven by extreme necessity. Here indeed, as I read your letter, I turned my mind attentively enough to recognize your necessity, when behold you bring it forward and say: 「You are not ignorant of men's manners, how prone they are to blame, and how, if one asked a question does not answer, he will be thought unlearned and dull.」

At this point, in truth, I burned to write back to you; for by this feebleness of your soul you pierced my breast and burst into my cares, so that I could not dissemble how earnestly God would help me to heal you — not that I should think about untangling and unfolding your questions, but that I should tear your happiness, which hangs upon and totters at the tongues of men, away from so wretched a mooring-rope and bind it to a certain seat wholly unshaken and stable. Do you then, O Dioscorus, not even regard your own Persius, who mocks you with a twisted little verse, and — if any sense be present — beats and chastises your utterly boyish head with a fitting cuff: 「Your knowing is nothing, unless another knows that you know it」?

You have read, as I said above, so many dialogues, you have plunged your heart into so many wranglings of philosophers! Tell me, I beg, which of them set the goal of his actions in the fame of the crowd or in the tongues of men, even of the good and wise. But you — and, what is more to be blushed at, now on the point of sailing — testify that you have made splendid progress in Africa, when you allege that you are a burden to bishops who are exceedingly busy and intent on far different matters, for no other cause than that they should expound Cicero to you — none other, that is, than that you fear men prone to blame, lest, being questioned by them, if you do not answer you be thought unlearned and dull! O what a thing worthy of the vigils and midnight labours of bishops!

You seem to me to think of nothing else, day and night, except that you may be praised by men for your studies and learning. And though I have judged this to be dangerous even to those who ever strive after sure and upright things, yet now I experience it above all in you. For it was from no other source than this very ruinous root that you failed to see by what consideration we might be moved to give you what you were asking. For just as perversely as you yourself are swept toward learning these things you ask about for no other reason than to be praised or not blamed by men, so perversely do you suppose that we too are moved in your petition by such causes when they are alleged.

And would that we could bring it about that you too might be least moved by so empty and deceptive a good as human praise, when we point out to you that we are moved, not to grant you what you ask (since it is these things you write of yourself), but to correct you! 「Men's manners,」 you say, 「are prone to blame.」 What then? 「If one who is asked does not answer,」 you say, 「he will be thought unlearned and dull.」 See, I question you — not about anything in Cicero's books, whose meaning perhaps readers cannot track down, but about your very letter and about the sense of your own words; for I ask: why did you not say, 「He who does not answer will be shown to be unlearned and dull,」 but rather said:

「He will be thought unlearned and dull」 — unless because you yourself well enough understand that one who does not answer such things is not unlearned and dull, but is thought so. But I admonish you that the man who fears to be mown down, as if by sickles, by the tongues of such thinkers-of-others, is a dry stick, and therefore is not merely thought unlearned and dull, but truly is so and is convicted of it. Perhaps you will say: 「But since I am not dull in mind, and above all am eager not to be so, I do not wish even to be thought dull in mind.」 Rightly; but I ask, with what goal you do not wish it.

For as to why, in getting these questions opened and unfolded for you, you did not hesitate to be a burden to us — this is the cause and this the goal you named, and one so necessary that you called it an excessive necessity: namely, lest, being questioned about these matters and not answering, you be thought by men prone to blame to be unlearned and dull. But I ask: is this the whole of it — the reason you desire these things from us — or is there also some other reason for which you are unwilling to be thought unlearned and dull? If this is the whole of it, you perceive, I think, that this is the goal of that vehement effort of yours by which you are even a burden to us, as you confess. But what can there be in Dioscorus that is a burden to us, save that which burdens Dioscorus himself even without his knowing it?

which he will not feel until he wishes to rise; and would that these burdens were not so bound on that he should even strive in vain to shake them off his shoulders! I say this not because these questions are learned, but because they are learned with such a goal. For this goal you surely already feel to be trifling, empty, windy; it has also a swelling, beneath which even a wasting corruption is bred, and the little pupil of the mind is overspread with darkness so as not to see the riches of truth. Believe me, so it is, my Dioscorus — so may I have joy of you in that very will, and in the very dignity of that truth whose shadow you turn from. For I find no other way to make you believe me about this matter, except at least in this manner. For you do not see it at all, nor can you see it, so long as you build ruinous joys upon human tongues.

But if the goal of these actions and of your effort does not lie there, and you are unwilling to be thought unlearned and dull for the sake of something else, I ask what that something is. If it is in order that access to you may not be too narrow for acquiring temporal riches, obtaining a wife, grasping honours, and other things of this kind that rush past in headlong flow and, having slipped into themselves, drag down into the depths those who have fallen with them, then neither is it fitting for us to serve you toward this goal — nay rather, it is fitting to draw you away even from this. For we do not forbid you to set your goal in the uncertainty of fame in such a way that you should migrate, as it were, from the Mincius into the Eridanus, into which perhaps the Mincius itself might dash you even when you were not migrating.

For since the vanity of human praise does not satisfy a greedy spirit, because it brings nothing to feed on save what is empty and puffed up, that very greed is compelled to carry it over into something else, as though richer and more fruitful; and if this too slips away in a temporal flux, it is just as if a river should lead into a river, so that there is no end of misery so long as the goal of our activities is placed in an unstable thing. We wish, therefore, to fix you in some firm and unchangeable good — the home of a most constant purpose and the most secure rest of all your good and honourable action.

Or do you perhaps think of carrying over even that earthly felicity which I mentioned — if by the breeze of prosperous rumour, or even by spreading your sails to its blasts, you could attain to it — of carrying this too over into some other true and certain and full good? But to me it does not seem so, and Truth itself altogether denies that it is reached either by such windings, seeing it is so very near, or at such cost, seeing it is so wholly free of charge.

Or do you think that human praise is to be used as an instrument, that through it you may prepare an approach to men's minds for persuading them of things true and wholesome, and do you take care that they may not, when they have thought you unlearned and dull, judge you unworthy to whom they should lend even a most attentive or most patient ear — whether you exhort someone to right deeds or rebuke the malice and wickedness of one who sins?

If it was this goal of justice and beneficence that you had in mind in questioning us about those matters, then you have deserved ill of us, in that in your letter you did not rather set before us that by which we might be moved — either gladly to give what you asked, or else not to give it because some other cause perhaps forbade — but did not set it so, because it would have shamed you not only to serve, but even not to resist, your empty desire.

For how much better and more wholesome it is, I ask you, that you receive by themselves the very rules of truth, far more surely and briefly, by which you may yourself refute all falsehoods, than that you should suppose yourself to be learned and understanding — which is a false and shameful thing — if with a zeal more boastful than prudent you have learned the aged and decrepit falsehoods of the many! But this I no longer think seems so to you; for it is not in vain that we have for so long said such true things to Dioscorus, ever since we set out upon this letter.

Wherefore let us now consider this: since you would judge yourself in no way unlearned and dull because of ignorance of these things, but would rather trust in truth itself — so that whatever anyone has written or shall write on these matters is either what you already hold with certainty, or, if it is false, you may without care be ignorant of it, and need not, over knowing the diversity of others' opinions, torment yourself with empty anxiety as though lest you remain unlearned and dull — since, then, these things are so, let us also

consider this, if you please: whether the false estimation of others — who, as you write, are prone to blame, so that, if they perceive you to be ignorant of these things, they would think you (falsely indeed, yet think it) unlearned and dull — ought so to move you that you should not unfittingly ask that these things be expounded to you even by bishops, seeing that we believe you now desire these things with the goal of taking counsel for those men, in order to persuade them of the truth and to correct their life — men who, if they thought you unlearned and dull in those books of Cicero, would hold you unworthy for them to receive from you anything of useful and wholesome knowledge.

But that it is not so — believe me — first, because I do not at all see that there are any people, in those lands where you fear to seem unskilled and least keen, who would question you at all about these matters, seeing that here, whither you came to learn them, and at Rome too, you have found by experience how negligently they are regarded, and for that reason are neither taught nor learned;

and in Africa you so far endure no questioner about these matters that you cannot even find anyone to endure your own questioning, and are driven by that lack to send them to bishops to be expounded — as though, forsooth, these bishops, even if as young men, with the same ardour of mind, or rather error, by which you are swept along, they took pains to learn these things as something great, would suffer them to endure in memory right up to episcopal grey hairs and to ecclesiastical chairs; or, if they wished it themselves, would not let greater and weightier cares shut them out even from unwilling hearts; or, if some of them remained in their minds through excessive habit, would not rather choose to bury even these in oblivion when recalled, than to answer with ineptitudes things inquired of — since, even in their very schoolboy frivolity and rhetorical chairs, they seem to have grown so mute and numb about them that they are thought fit to be sent from Carthage to Hippo to be expounded, where they are so unusual and altogether foreign that, if I wished, out of care to answer, to look at something, wishing to see how one might come from above to the sentence that had to be expounded to me, or what discourse would next be woven from it, I could find no book at all.

But those Carthaginian rhetoricians, if they failed this zeal of yours, are not only not blamed by me, but even approved, if perchance they now recall that such contests are wont to belong not to the forums of the Romans but to the gymnasia of the Greeks. But you, when you had cast your thought even upon the gymnasia, and had found even these themselves bare and cold of such things, where you might lay down these cares of yours, the Christian basilica of Hippo occurred to you, because in it now sits a bishop who once upon a time sold these things to boys. But I do not wish you to be still a boy, and it does not become me, who was no seller of childish things, to be their bestower either.

Since these things are so — that is, since two such great cities, craftsmen of Latin letters, Rome and Carthage, are neither so wearisome to you that they should inquire these things of you, nor concerned about your wearinesses so as to give ear to you inquiring these things — I marvel beyond what can be told that you, a young man of such fine talent, fear that in the Greek and eastern cities you may meet anyone troublesome who questions you about these matters. For more easily would you hear little crows in Africa than that kind of voice in those parts.

Then, if I am mistaken, and someone there should perchance turn up as an inquirer into questions of this kind — the more odious for being the more inept in those places — do you not rather beware lest there far more easily arise those Greek men who, finding you set in Greece and imbued from the first with the Greek tongue, may question you about some things from the very books of the philosophers, things which Cicero did not put in his own writings? And if this should happen, what will you answer? That you preferred to know these things in the books of Latin authors rather than of Greek? By which answer you will first do injury to Greece, and you know how those men do not endure this;

then, already galled and angered, how quickly will they judge you — the very thing you so greatly do not wish — both dull, seeing you preferred to learn the doctrines of the Greek philosophers, or rather certain scraps of doctrines, torn off and scattered, in Latin dialogues, rather than whole and connected in the Greeks' own authors, and unlearned, seeing that, while you are ignorant of so much in your own tongue, you have gone about gathering fragments of those matters in a foreign one! Or will you perhaps answer this: that you did not despise the Greek books on these subjects, but first took care to know the Latin, and now, being learned in Latin, wish to inquire into the Greek?

If this does not shame you — that a Greek man learned Latin things as a boy, and now, bearded, wishes to learn Greek — will it not at last shame you to be ignorant of certain things in Latin itself, things which how many learned Latins are ignorant of along with you? Or do you feel this very thing from the fact that you tell us you are burdensome, out of great necessity, though set amid so great a multitude of learned men at Carthage? Finally, suppose you had been able to answer everything you ask of us when questioned. Behold, you are now called most learned and most keen; behold, now the Greekling breeze lifts you to heaven with praises;

only do you remember your own gravity, and with what goal you wished to earn that praise — namely, that those who have lightly marvelled at these light things, and now most benevolently and most greedily hang upon your lips, you may teach them something most weighty and most wholesome. This very thing, whatever it be that is most weighty and most wholesome — whether you hold it and know how to hand it on rightly — I should like to learn. For it is ridiculous that, when you have learned so many superfluous things in order that men's ears may be prepared for you toward the necessary things, you should not hold the necessary things themselves for the reception of which you have prepared those ears through the superfluous, and that, while you are occupied in learning that whereby you may make them attentive, you should be unwilling to learn what is to be poured into the attentive.

But if you say that you now know this, and answer that this very thing is the Christian doctrine — which we know you set above all things, and in it alone presume to have the hope of eternal salvation — then there is no need to procure hearers by knowledge of Cicero's dialogues and by a collection of begged-for, discordant opinions of others. Let those who are to receive something of the sort from you become intent upon your character. I do not wish you first to teach something that must be unlearned, in order to teach true things.

For if knowledge of others' dissenting and conflicting opinions helps in some way the one who instils Christian truth, so that he may know how to demolish opposing falsehoods — but only to this extent, lest anyone disputing against you should fix his eye solely on refuting your positions while carefully hiding his own; for the knowledge of truth is fit both to judge and to overthrow all falsehoods, if only they are brought forth, even those before unheard of — but if, in order that not only the open may be struck but even the hidden dug out, it is necessary to know others' errors, then lift up your eyes and ears, I beg you, and see and listen whether anyone brings forward anything against us concerning Anaximenes and Anaxagoras, seeing that not even the ashes of the much more recent and much more talkative Stoics or Epicureans are now warm, whence any spark might be kindled against the Christian faith.

But rather let the circles and conventicles resound innumerably — some fleeting, some even boldly forward — whether of Donatists, or Maximianists, or Manichaeans, or even (to whose flocks and throng you are about to come) of Arians, Eunomians, Macedonians, Cataphrygians, and the rest of those plagues. If it irks you to know the errors of all these, what business have we, for the defence of the Christian religion, to inquire what Anaximenes held, and to cook up again with empty curiosity quarrels long put to sleep, when even the dissensions and questions of certain heretics too — who have been unwilling to glory in the Christian name, like the Marcionites and Sabellians and many besides — are now passed over in silence?

Yet if it is necessary, as I said, for one to foreknow some of the opinions opposing truth and to have them thoroughly handled, we had rather to think about heretics who call themselves Christians than about Anaxagoras and Democritus. But let that man, whoever he be, who shall inquire of you the things you inquire of us, hear that you are the more learnedly and prudently ignorant of them. For if Themistocles did not care that he was reckoned rather unlearned, when he had refused to sing to the lyre at a banquet, where, having said that he did not know how, and being told, 「What then do you know?」, he answered:

「To make a republic great from small」 — then you should hesitate to say that you do not know these things, since to him who asked what you know, you could answer that you know how a man may be blessed even without them. But if you do not yet hold this, you seek out those things as perversely as, if you were burdened by some dangerous bodily disease, you should seek out delicious and most delicate garments rather than medicines and physicians. For this knowledge is by no means to be deferred, nor is that other to be preferred to this by you — especially now, at this age of yours — even in the order of learning. But see how easily you could know this, if you would.

For he who seeks by what path he may come to the blessed life seeks assuredly nothing else than where the end of good lies — that is, where the supreme good of man is established, not by depraved and rash opinion, but by sure and unshaken truth. And this, wherever it be established, is not found by anyone except either in the body, or in the soul, or in God, or in some two of these, or certainly in all. But if you have learned that neither the supreme good nor any part of the supreme good is at all in the body, two will remain — soul and God — in one of which, or in both, it lies.