Letters & Polemics (CSEL) 5 part 53/118

For there are many things from which, if their perception still shrinks back and recoils, it may perhaps sometime be persuaded either by a fuller or a subtler reasoning, or at any rate by an authority which they think it unworthy to resist. Therefore, in your letter you set down that certain persons are troubled 'why this God, who is affirmed to be also the God of the Old Testament, having spurned the ancient sacrifices, took delight in new ones. For they assert that nothing can be corrected except what was proved to have been not rightly done before; or that what has once been rightly done ought in no way to be changed. For they say that things rightly done cannot be changed except unjustly.' These words I have transferred from your letter into this letter of mine.

If I should wish to answer these things copiously, time would fail me sooner than the examples by which, with sure reason, the very nature of things and human works are changed according to the opportuneness of the times — and yet the reason by which those things are changed is not itself changeable. Hence let me recall a few, so that, roused by these in a certain way, the wakeful attention may now run on through many similar cases. Does not summer, with heat gradually added, succeed to winter? Are not the times of night turned into those of day? How often are our ages varied! Boyhood, not to return, yields to adolescence; youth, not to remain, succeeds to adolescence; old age, ending youth, is ended by death. All these things are changed, and the reason of divine providence, by which it comes about that they are changed, is not changed.

But not, I suppose, when the farmer has commanded one thing in summer than he had commanded in winter, is the reason of agriculture changed. And when he who was resting at night rises in the morning, he has not changed the plan of his life. The master imposed one thing on the youth than he was wont to impose on the boy; the teaching, therefore, being constant, has changed things with the precept changed, itself not changed. That great physician of our times, Vindicianus, being consulted by a certain man, ordered to be applied to his pain what seemed to suit at the time; when it was applied, health followed. Then, after some years, the same bodily trouble being stirred up again, that same man thought this same thing ought to be applied; it turned to the worse. Amazed, he runs back to the physician, indicates what was done; but he, keen as he was, answered thus:

'You were ill-served because it was not I who ordered it' — so that all who had heard, and knew the man too little, might reckon that he trusted not in the medical art but in some unlawful power or other. Whence, being questioned by those who could, as they stood amazed, he disclosed what they had not understood: namely, that he would not have ordered this for that age. So much, then, does it avail, with reason and the arts unchanged, [to know] what according to them ought to be changed with the variety of times. It is not therefore true, as is said, that what has once been rightly done ought in no way to be changed.

For when the circumstances of the time are changed, true reason very often demands that what had rightly been done before should be changed in such a way that, although the objectors themselves say it would not be rightly done if it were changed, on the contrary truth cries out that it would not be rightly done unless it were changed; for both will then be right, if what is right differs according to the diversity of times. For just as, amid a diversity of persons, it can happen at one and the same time that this man may lawfully do something with impunity while that man may not, not because the thing is different but because the one who does it is, so it must sometimes be that at different times something ought to be done by one and the same person and at another time ought not to be done, not because the doer is unlike himself, but because of when he does it.

How widely this question extends, anyone perceives who is able, and does not neglect, to contemplate the distinction between the beautiful and the fitting, which is in a certain manner scattered throughout the universe of things. For the beautiful is considered and praised in and by itself, and to it the base and deformed is contrary. But the fitting, to which the unfitting stands opposed, hangs as it were bound from something else, and is judged not from itself but from that to which it is connected; and doubtless the becoming and the unbecoming are either the very same thing or are regarded in like manner. Come now, apply what we have said to the matter under discussion. The sacrifice which God had commanded was fitting for the earliest times, but now it is not so.

For He commanded something else that was fitting for this present time; He who far better than man knows what may be suitably applied to each time, what He should impart at each moment, add, take away, withdraw, increase or diminish—He the unchangeable ordainer of changeable things, even as He is their creator, until the beauty of the whole age, of which those things are but little parts that are fitting each to its own times, runs its course like a great song of some ineffable composer, and thence they who rightly worship God pass over into the eternal contemplation of His splendor, even now while it is the time of faith.

But those are mistaken who suppose that God commands these things for the sake of His own advantage or pleasure, and they are rightly moved to ask why God should have changed them, as though out of a changeable delight commanding one thing to be offered to Himself at that earlier time and another at this. But it is not so. God commands nothing that may profit Himself, but only him whom He commands. Therefore He is the true Lord, who has no need of His servant, yet whom His servant needs; for indeed in that Scripture which is called the Old Testament and was spoken at that time when those sacrifices were still being offered which at this time are not offered, it is written: I said to the Lord, 'You are my Lord, for You have no need of my goods.'

God therefore had no need of those sacrifices, nor does He ever need anything of anyone; but they are certain signs of things divinely bestowed, whether for imbuing the soul with virtues or for attaining eternal salvation; and by the celebration and performance of them there are exercised duties of piety useful not to God but to us. But it would be far too long to discuss fittingly the variety of signs, which, when they pertain to divine things, are called sacraments.

But just as God is not changeable because one thing pleases in the morning and another in the evening, one thing in this month and another in that, one thing this year and not the same the next, so too God is not changeable because in the earlier volume of the whole age He commanded one thing to be offered to Himself, and in the later volume another, whereby He might fittingly dispose, through changeable times and without any change in Himself, the significations pertaining to the most salutary teaching of religion. For, that those whom these things disturb may know that this was already in the divine plan, and that when these new things were established the former did not suddenly become displeasing as though by a changeable will, but that this was already fixed and appointed in the very wisdom of God—concerning even greater changes of things the same Scripture says to Him:

You shall change them and they shall be changed, but You are the same. It must be impressed upon them that this very change of the sacraments of the Old and New Testaments was also foretold by prophetic utterances. For thus they will see, if they can, that what is new in time is not new with Him who founded the times and, without time, possesses all things which He distributes to their several times according to their variety. For even in that psalm from which I quoted something to show that God has no need of our sacrifices—to whom it is said, I said to the Lord, 'You are my Lord, for You have no need of my goods'—a little later there is read, spoken in the person of Christ:

I will not gather their assemblies out of bloods—that is, out of the victims of cattle, by which the assemblies of the Jews were formerly gathered; and elsewhere He says: I will not take calves out of your house, nor he-goats out of your flocks; and another prophet says: Behold, the days shall come, says the Lord, and I will confirm over the house of Jacob a new covenant, not according to the covenant which I ordained for their fathers when I led them out of the land of Egypt. And there are many other testimonies on this matter, by which it was foretold that God would do this, which it would now be tedious to recount.

If now it has been sufficiently established that what has rightly been instituted at one time can likewise rightly be changed at another—by a change in the operation of the one who changes, not in the ordinance, which ordinance the intelligible reason contains, where, without time, those things are together which cannot be done together in time (because times do not run together)—someone perhaps may expect to receive from us the causes of that change itself, which you yourself know to be a matter of very great length.

Nevertheless it can be said briefly what may perhaps suffice for a keen mind: that Christ, when He was about to come, had to be foreannounced by certain sacraments, and, when He had come, to be announced by others—just as, even now, in the very act of speaking of this, the diversity of the matters has compelled us also to change our words, since indeed 'to be foreannounced' is one thing and 'to be announced' another, and 'when He was about to come' one thing and 'when He had come' another. Now let us next see what sort of thing that is which follows in your letter.

For you added that they say Christ's preaching and teaching is in no respect consonant with the customs of the commonwealth, since it is agreed that this is His precept: that we ought to render evil to no one for evil, and to offer the other cheek to him who strikes, and to give one's cloak to him who persists in taking away one's tunic, and that we ought to go double the length of the journey with him who would compel us to go with him—all of which they assert to be contrary to the customs of the commonwealth. 'For who,'

they say, 'would suffer anything to be taken from him by an enemy, or would be unwilling to requite evils by the law of war upon the plunderers of a Roman province?' These and words of this kind, from men who disparage—or who, not disparaging but inquiring, speak such things—I would perhaps refute more laboriously, were not these debates held with men liberally educated. Wherefore what need is there for us to labor longer, and not rather to question the men themselves, how they could govern and enlarge the commonwealth, which from small and poor they made great and wealthy, who 'preferred to pardon a wrong received rather than to avenge it'? In what way did Cicero, extolling the character of Caesar—himself surely an administrator of the commonwealth—say to him that he was accustomed to forget nothing except injuries?

For so great a praiser—or so great a flatterer—said this. But if a praiser, he knew Caesar to be such; if a flatterer, he was showing what the chief man of the state ought to be, such as he falsely proclaimed him. But what is it not to render evil for evil, except to shrink from the lust of vengeance—which is to prefer to pardon a wrong received rather than to pursue it, and to forget nothing except injuries? When these things are read in their own authors, men cry out and applaud; there seem to be described and celebrated the very characters worthy of a state that should rise to command so many nations, in that they 'preferred to pardon a wrong received rather than to avenge it.'

But when it is read, at the bidding of divine authority, that evil is not to be rendered for evil; when this so wholesome admonition resounds from a higher place to the congregations of the peoples, as though in public schools of both sexes and of all ages and dignities, then religion is accused as an enemy of the commonwealth. Yet if it were heard, as it deserves, it would establish, consecrate, strengthen, and enlarge the commonwealth far better than did Romulus, Numa, Brutus, and those other illustrious men of the Roman race. For what is a commonwealth (res publica) but the affair of a people (res populi)? It is therefore a common affair, an affair surely of a city. And what is a city but a multitude of men reduced into a certain bond of concord? For among them it is thus written:

'In a brief time a multitude, diverse and wandering, had by concord been made a city.' And what precepts of concord did they ever judge worthy to be read in their temples—seeing that the wretched men were compelled to seek in what way, without offense to any of their gods, they might worship their gods who were at discord among themselves; and if they wished to imitate them by discord, the bond of concord being broken, the city would fall—which afterward, little by little, as morals were discolored and corrupted, began to come to pass through civil wars? But how great are the precepts of concord—not sought out by human disputations but written down by divine authority—that are constantly read in the churches of Christ! Who, even one estranged from that religion, is so deaf as not to know this?

For to this belong also those things which they prefer to rail at rather than to learn: that the other cheek is to be offered to him who strikes, that to him who wishes to take away the tunic the cloak also is to be given, that with him who compels the road is to be doubled. This indeed is done so that the evil man may be overcome by good—nay rather, that in the evil man the evil may be overcome by good, and the man be delivered from evil, not an outward and alien evil, but an inward and his own, by which he is laid waste more grievously and perniciously than by the savagery of any enemy from without. Whoever therefore overcomes evil with good, patiently forgoes temporal advantages, that he may teach how, for the sake of faith and righteousness, those things are to be despised which that other man, by loving too much, becomes evil.

And thus let the one who does the wrong learn, from the very man to whom he did the wrong, what those things are for the sake of which he did wrong, and, repenting, be won over into concord—than which nothing is more useful to a city—being conquered not by the strength of one raging but by the benevolence of one enduring. For then it is rightly done, when it seems that it will profit him for whose sake it is done, for the working of correction and concord in him. This assuredly must be done with such a disposition, even if another outcome follow, and he for whose correcting and pacifying, as though for whose curing and healing, this medicine has been applied, be unwilling to be corrected and pacified. Otherwise, if we attend to the words and think we must serve their literal sense, the right cheek is not to be offered if the left has been struck, since:

If anyone, He says, strike you on the right cheek, offer him the left also. But rather the left is struck, because from the striker's right hand the blow is easier. But it is customarily understood as if it had been said: If anyone shall have persecuted you in the better things, offer him also the inferior ones, lest, more zealous for vengeance than for patience, you despise eternal things for the sake of temporal, whereas rather temporal things are to be despised for the sake of eternal, as the left for the right. This was always the intention of the holy martyrs; for the final vengeance is justly demanded when no place any longer remains for correction—namely at the last and highest judgment.

But now we must beware lest, through the desire of avenging, there be lost—if nothing else—patience itself, which is to be esteemed more than everything that an enemy can take away even against our will. For indeed another evangelist, in the same saying, made no mention of the right, but named only the cheek and the other, so that it might be understood somewhat more distinctly in the one, while the other simply commended the same patience. The just and pious man ought therefore to be prepared to endure patiently the malice of those whom he seeks to make good, so that the number of the good may rather increase, and not that by equal malice he too may add himself to the number of the evil.

Finally, that these precepts pertain rather to the preparation of the heart, which is within, than to the deed which is done openly—so that patience together with benevolence may be held in the secret of the soul, while in the open there is done what seems capable of profiting those to whom we ought to wish well—this is clearly shown from the fact that the Lord Christ Himself, that singular example of patience, when He was struck on the face, answered: If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; but if well, why do you strike Me? By no means, then, did He fulfill His own precept, if we look at the words;

for He did not offer the other side to the striker, but rather forbade him who had done it to increase the wrong; and yet He had come prepared not only to be struck on the face, but even to be crucified and slain for those very ones from whom He suffered these things—for whom He said, hanging on the cross: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Nor does the apostle Paul seem to have fulfilled the precept of his Lord and Master, where he too, being struck on the face, said to the chief priest: God shall strike you, you whitewashed wall. Do you sit to judge me according to the law, and against the law order me to be struck? And when it was said by the bystanders:

You revile the chief priest, he wished mockingly to admonish them what he had said, so that those who had understanding might perceive that by the coming of Christ the whitewashed wall—that is, the hypocrisy of the Jewish priesthood—was now to be destroyed; for he said: I knew not, brethren, that he is the chief priest; for it is written: You shall not speak evil of the ruler of your people—when beyond all doubt he who had grown up among that same people and had there been instructed in the law could not fail to know that man to be the chief priest, nor could he in any way deceive those to whom he was so well known into thinking that he did not know it. These precepts of patience, therefore, are ever to be retained in the preparation of the heart, and benevolence itself, that evil be not rendered for evil, is ever to be fulfilled in the will.

But many things must be done, even against the unwilling, by chastising them with a certain benign severity, for whose advantage rather than their will consideration must be had; this the writings of those very men most brilliantly praised in the case of the chief man of the state. For in chastising a son, however harshly, paternal love is assuredly never lost; yet what he does not wish is done, and he grieves, who even against his will seems in need of being healed by grief. And through this, if that earthly commonwealth were to keep the Christian precepts, even its wars would not be waged without benevolence, so that provision might more easily be made for the conquered toward the peaceable fellowship of piety and justice.

For he from whom the license of iniquity is snatched away is conquered to his own profit, since nothing is more unhappy than the happiness of those who sin, whereby a penal impunity is nourished and an evil will, like an inner enemy, is strengthened. But the perverse and adverse hearts of mortals think human affairs happy when the splendor of buildings is regarded and the ruin of souls is disregarded; when the masses of theaters are raised up and the foundations of virtues are dug away; when the madness of squandering is glorified and works of mercy are derided; when, out of those things

which abound to the rich, the actors revel in luxury while the poor scarcely have necessities; when God, who by the public utterances of His teaching cries out against this public evil, is blasphemed by impious peoples, and such gods are sought in whose honor those very theatrical disgraces of bodies and souls may be celebrated. If God should permit these things to flourish, then He is more grievously indignant; if He should let them go unpunished, then He punishes more relentlessly. But when He overthrows the support of vices and renders the abundant lusts destitute, He opposes them mercifully—for mercifully, if it could be, even wars would be waged by good men, so that, licentious cupidities being tamed, these vices might be destroyed which by just government ought either to be extirpated or held in check.

For if Christian discipline condemned all wars, this counsel of salvation would rather have been given in the Gospel to the soldiers seeking it, that they should cast away their arms and withdraw themselves altogether from soldiery. But it was said to them: Do violence to no one, accuse no one falsely, and be content with your wages. Those to whom He commanded that their own wages should suffice, He surely did not forbid to serve as soldiers. Accordingly, let those who say that the teaching of Christ is opposed to the commonwealth furnish an army such as the teaching of Christ commanded soldiers to be;

let them furnish such provincials, such husbands, such wives, such parents, such children, such masters, such servants, such kings, such judges, and finally such payers and collectors of the very tributes of the treasury as Christian teaching has commanded them to be; and let them dare to say that this teaching is opposed to the commonwealth—nay rather, let them not hesitate to confess that it is, if it be obeyed, a great salvation for the commonwealth. But as for how I should answer what they say, that through certain Christian emperors many evils have befallen the Roman empire—this general complaint is slanderous.

For if they were to recount somewhat more openly certain things about past emperors, I too could recount similar or perhaps even graver things about non-Christian emperors, so that they might understand that these are the vices either of men, not of the teaching, or not of the emperors but of others, without whom the emperors can do nothing. From what time the Roman commonwealth began to go to ruin is sufficiently clear; their own literature speaks of it. Long before the name of Christ shone forth on earth, it was said:

'O venal city, and soon to perish, if it should find a buyer!' Also in the book of the Catilinarian War, before the coming of Christ, that same most noble historian of theirs does not keep silent as to when 'the army of the Roman people first grew accustomed to make love, to drink, to admire statues, paintings, and chased vessels, to seize these things privately and publicly, to despoil shrines, and to pollute all things sacred and profane.' When therefore the avarice and rapacity of corrupt and abandoned morals spared neither men nor even those whom they thought gods, then began to perish that praiseworthy glory and welfare of the commonwealth. What vices thereafter attended their prosperous successes, and with how great an evil to human affairs that iniquity was made to prosper, it would now be tedious to tell.

Let them hear their own satirist, speaking truths by way of prattle: Once humble fortune preserved the Latin women chaste, nor allowed their little dwellings to be touched by vices—their toil and short sleeps, their hands vexed and hardened by Tuscan wool, and Hannibal close to the city, and their husbands standing on the Colline tower. Now we suffer the evils of a long peace; luxury, more savage than arms, has fallen upon us and avenges the conquered world. No crime, no deed of lust is absent, since Roman poverty perished. Why then do you expect that I should exaggerate how great evils were brought in by iniquity uplifted by prosperous success, seeing that even those who attended somewhat more prudently saw that it was more to be lamented that Roman poverty had perished than Roman wealth?

For in that poverty integrity of morals was preserved, but through this wealth a dire wickedness, worse than any enemy, burst in—not upon the walls of the city, but upon the very minds of the city. Thanks be to the Lord our God, who against these evils has sent us a singular help. For into what depths would that river of the dreadful wickedness of the human race not have swept, not have engulfed, not have plunged whomever it seized, had not the cross of Christ been fixed, more eminently and more firmly, upon so great a mass, as it were, of authority—by grasping the strength of which we might stand firm, lest we, snatched away in the so vast whirlpool of this world, should be swallowed up by those who counsel evilly or drive men into evils?

For in this filth of the worst morals and of ancient, ruined discipline, the heavenly authority most of all had to come and bring succor—the authority which would persuade voluntary poverty, continence, benevolence, justice, concord, and true piety, and the other luminous and strong virtues of life, not only for the sake of leading this life most honorably, nor only for the sake of the most harmonious fellowship of the earthly city, but also for the sake of obtaining everlasting salvation and the heavenly and divine commonwealth of a certain everlasting people—into whose citizens faith, hope, and charity enroll us; so that, as long as we are pilgrims away from it, we may bear with those, if we cannot correct them, who wish the commonwealth to stand with its vices unpunished, the commonwealth which the earliest Romans established and enlarged by virtues; who, although not having true piety toward the true God—which could have led them even into the eternal city by a wholesome religion—nevertheless preserved a certain probity of their own kind, such as could suffice for constituting, enlarging, and preserving the earthly city.

For God thus showed, in the most wealthy and illustrious empire of the Romans, how much even civic virtues without true religion could avail, so that it might be understood that, this being added, men become citizens of another city, whose king is truth, whose law is charity, whose measure is eternity. But who would think even worthy of laughter that they attempt to compare Apollonius and Apuleius and the other men most skilled in the magic arts with Christ, or even to prefer them to Him? Although it is more tolerable to be borne when they compare these men to Him rather than their own gods; for—which must be confessed—Apollonius was much better than the author and perpetrator of so many debaucheries whom they name Jupiter. 'Those things,' they say, 'are fabulous.'

Let them then still praise the luxurious, licentious, and plainly sacrilegious felicity of the commonwealth, which fabricated these disgraces of the gods, which it not only set forth to be heard in fables but even proposed to be watched in theaters, where the crimes were more numerous than the deities—crimes which the very gods themselves were glad to have exhibited to them, gods who ought to have taken vengeance upon their own worshipers for seeing such things at least with patience. 'But it is not they themselves,' they say, 'who are honored by the falsehood of such fables.' Who then are these who are appeased by the celebration of such basenesses?

Since the Christian teaching has exposed the perversity and deceit of these demons—through whom the magic arts also deceive human minds—since it has laid it bare to the whole world, since it has distinguished the holy angels from their malignity, since it has admonished that they are rather to be guarded against, and in what manner they might be guarded against, it is said to be an enemy of the commonwealth—as though, if temporal felicity were altogether to be obtained through these demons, any other unhappiness whatever ought not rather to be chosen.

But neither did God wish there to be doubt on this point—He who so long as the Old Testament, wherein is the veil of the New, had to be overshadowed, honored with so great a felicity of earthly things the first people who worshiped the one true God and despised the utterly false gods, so that anyone might understand that this very felicity is not in the power of demons, but in the power of that One whom the angels serve and before whom the demons tremble. For Apuleius—to speak especially of him who to us Africans, being an African, is better known—was able, with all his magic arts, to attain not, I say, to a kingdom, but not even to any judicial power in the commonwealth, though born in an honorable station of his native land, liberally educated, and endowed with great eloquence.