You give good counsel, dearest Donatus: for I both remember that I promised it, and this is altogether a fitting time for fulfilling it, when, the vintage now indulging us, the unbound mind takes its allotted rest in the solemn and appointed respite of the wearying year. The place too agrees with the day, and the pleasant aspect of the gardens, soothing to the senses and cherishing them with the gentle airs of caressing autumn, is in harmony: here to pass a delightful day in conversation, and by studious discourse to instruct the conscience of the heart in the divine precepts. And lest some profane onlooker hinder our speaking, or the unrestrained clamor of a noisy household dull our talk, let us seek out this retreat:
the neighboring secluded spots offer a retreat, where, while the wandering shoots of the vine-branches creep with pendulous links over the supporting reeds, they have made of their leafy covering a vine-clad portico. Here it is good to give our studies to the ear, and while we look upon the trees and the vines, we gladden our eyes with the delightful prospect, and at once the hearing is instructed and the gaze feeds the soul: though for you now the only pleasure, the only care, is the discourse, and, despising the allurements of pleasant sights, you have fixed your eyes upon me; with what mouth, with what mind, you are wholly a listener, and that with the love wherewith you love me.
But as for the quality or measure of what may come into your breast from us — my slender genius's narrow mediocrity bears but very meager fruits, and is not laden to abundance with any towering crops of a fertile soil — yet I will attempt it with such faculty as I have: for the very matter of speaking works together with me. In the law courts, before the rostra, let opulent eloquence be flaunted with voluble ostentation: when the speech is of the Lord and of God, the pure sincerity of the voice rests, not upon the powers of eloquence, but upon facts, for the proofs of faith. So then, receive things not eloquent but strong, not painted with cultivated speech for the allurement of a popular audience, but simple in their unpolished truth, for the proclaiming of the divine mercy:
receive that which is felt before it is learned, and is not gathered by slow recognition through long delays, but is drained at one draught by the shortcut of a maturing grace. When I lay in darkness and in blind night, and, wavering and doubtful, was tossed amid the surge of this storm-tossed world, ignorant of my own life, a stranger to truth and light, I used to think it altogether difficult and hard — given those manners of mine then — that which the divine mercy was promising me for my salvation: namely, that a man could be born again, and, quickened to a new life by the laver of the saving water, could lay aside what he had formerly been, and, though the frame of the body remained, could change the man in soul and mind.
How is so great a conversion possible, I would say, that suddenly and swiftly there be cast off what either, being innate, has hardened with the stiffness of natural substance, or, long practiced, has grown ingrained with the age of long habit? These things have settled with a deep and profoundly inward root. When does he learn frugality who has been accustomed to lavish feasts and abundant banquets? And he who, conspicuous in costly raiment, has shone in gold and in purple — when does he lower himself to a plebeian and simple dress? He who has delighted in the rods and honors cannot bear to be deprived of them and without glory. This man, surrounded by throngs of clients, honored by the more frequent retinue of an attendant train, thinks it a punishment to be alone.
By tenacious allurements it must needs be that, as was its wont, drunkenness invites, pride puffs up, anger inflames, rapacity disquiets, cruelty goads, ambition delights, lust hurls headlong. These things I often pondered within myself. For I too was held entangled by very many errors of my former life, from which I did not believe I could be freed: so submissive was I to the vices that clung to me, that, in despair of better things, I even favored my own evils as though they were now my own and homebred.
But after the stain of the former age had been washed away by the aid of the regenerating waters, and the light poured itself from above into my cleansed and pure breast; after, having drunk in the Spirit from heaven, a second birth restored me into a new man — in a wondrous manner doubtful things at once began to assure themselves, closed things to open, dark things to shine, that to become possible which before seemed difficult, that to be capable of accomplishment which was thought impossible — so that I could recognize that what before, being carnally born, lived subject to faults, had been earthly, and that what the Holy Spirit was now quickening had begun to be of God. You assuredly know, and along with me you recall, what that death of sins took from us, what the life of virtues conferred. You yourself know it, and I do not proclaim it: to boast in one's own praises is odious:
although it cannot be boasting but thanksgiving, whatever is ascribed not to a man's virtue but proclaimed as from the gift of God, so that now not to sin has begun to be of faith, whereas before to sin had been of human error. It is of God, I say, of God, all that we can do. Thence we live, thence we are strong, thence, drawing and conceiving vigor, we, while still placed here, foreknow the signs of things to come: only let fear be the guardian of innocence, that the Lord, who has graciously flowed into our minds by the gliding-in of the heavenly mercy, may by righteous working be kept in the lodging of a delighting soul, lest the security received beget negligence and the old enemy steal in again.
For the rest, if you keep the way of innocence, the way of righteousness, with the firmness of your footstep unfaltering; if, suspended upon God with all your might and all your heart, you be only this which you have begun to be, then so much is granted you for liberty as the grace of the Spirit is increased in you. For it is not, as is the manner of earthly benefits, that there is any measure or limit in receiving the gift of God. The Spirit, flowing forth abundantly, is restrained by no bounds, nor is it reined in by confining barriers within fixed limits of measured space. It flows perpetually, it overflows abundantly: let only our breast thirst and lie open. As much capacity of faith as we bring thither, so much of the inundating grace do we draw.
Thence now the power is granted, with sober chastity, with an undefiled mind, with a pure voice, to be able to extinguish the poison of venoms for the healing of the suffering, to purge by restored soundness the stains of disordered minds, to bid peace to the hostile, quiet to the violent, gentleness to the savage; to compel the unclean and wandering spirits, who have plunged in to assail men, to confession by threatening rebukes; to urge them with harsh blows to depart, to stretch them out, struggling, wailing, groaning, with the increase of an extending punishment, to scourge them with lashes, to scorch them with fire. There the thing is done and is not seen: hidden the blow, manifest the punishment. Thus what we have now begun to be, the received Spirit possesses with its own liberty:
in that we have not yet changed our body and members, the carnal sight is still blinded by the cloud of the world. How great here is the dominion of the soul, how great the power — not only that one's very self be withdrawn from the destructive contacts of the world, so that, cleansed and pure, he be seized by no stain of the assailing enemy, but that he be made yet greater and stronger in strength, so that with imperious right he may lord it over the whole army of the raging adversary. And that, the truth being laid bare, the proofs of the divine gift may shine forth the more illustriously, I will give you light unto knowledge: the gloom of evils being wiped away, I will reveal the darkness of the veiled world.
Imagine yourself for a little while to be carried up to the loftier summit of a steep mountain; survey from there the appearance of things lying beneath you, and, with your eyes stretched out in different directions, yourself free from earthly contacts, behold the whirlwinds of the surging world: now you yourself will also have pity on the age, and, admonished concerning yourself and more grateful to God, you will congratulate yourself with greater joy that you have escaped. Behold the roads closed by robbers, the seas beset by pirates, wars everywhere divided with the bloody horror of camps. The world is drenched with mutual blood: and when individuals commit homicide, it is a crime; it is called valor when it is done publicly. Not the reckoning of innocence, but the greatness of savagery, procures impunity for crimes.
Now if you turn your eyes and face to the cities themselves, you will meet with a crowded scene sadder than any solitude. The gladiatorial game is prepared, that blood may delight the lust of cruel eyes. The body is fed up to its juices with stronger foods, and the robust mass of the limbs grows fat with cushions of lard, that, fattened, it may perish the more dearly for punishment. A man is slain for a man's pleasure, and to be able to kill is skill, is practice, is an art: crime is not only committed but taught. What can be said more inhuman, what more bitter? It is a discipline that one may be able to slay, and it is glory that he slays. What is that, I pray you, of what sort is it, where men throw themselves to the beasts whom no one has condemned, of unimpaired age, of comely enough form, in costly garb?
Living, they are adorned for their own voluntary funeral; wretched in their own evils, they even glory. They fight with beasts not for a crime but out of frenzy. Fathers watch their own sons; a brother is in the arena and a sister is at hand; and although a more lavish provision of the show may enhance the price of the spectacle, that a mother may be present at her own sorrows — this, alas for the grief, a mother both pays for. And in spectacles so impious and so dreadful, they do not think themselves parricides in the eyes of such. Turn your face away from here to the no less to-be-repented defilements of another kind of spectacle: in the theaters too you will behold what may be to you both for grief and for shame. The tragic buskin is to recount in song the crimes of old:
the ancient horror of parricides and incests is replayed in an action expressed to the likeness of reality, lest, as the ages pass on, what was once committed should fade away. Every age is admonished by the hearing that what was done can be done. Never do crimes die by the old age of time, never is the offense buried by the passing of seasons, never is the crime entombed in oblivion. Things become examples which have now ceased to be misdeeds. Then it delights, in the mimes, by the teaching of basenesses, either to recognize what one has done at home, or to hear what one may be able to do. Adultery is learned while it is seen; and, the evil of public authority playing the pander to vices, a matron who had perhaps gone forth chaste to the spectacle returns from the spectacle unchaste.
And further then, how great a defilement of morals, what fomentations of disgraces, what nourishments of vices — to be polluted by the gestures of actors, to behold, against the covenant and right of birth, the elaborated endurance of incestuous baseness: males are emasculated, all the honor and vigor of the sex is softened in the disgrace of an enervated body, and there he pleases the more whoever the more has broken a man down into a woman. He grows in praise out of crime, and is judged the more skilled the more shameful he is. Such a one is gazed upon — O abomination! — and willingly. What could he not persuade, who is such? He moves the senses, he soothes the affections, he storms the stronger conscience of an upright breast: nor is there lacking the authority of an enticing disgrace, that by a softer hearing destruction may steal upon men.
They portray a shameless Venus, an adulterous Mars, and that Jove of theirs, a prince no more in his kingdom than in his vices, burning with earthly loves together with his very thunderbolts: now whitening into the down of a swan, now flowing down in a golden shower, now leaping forth, by his bird-attendants, into the ravishings of striplings. Ask now whether one who watches can be whole or chaste. He imitates his own gods whom he venerates: and to wretched men even their crimes become religious. O if you could, set upon that lofty watchtower, insert your eyes into secret places, throw open the closed doors of bedchambers and unbar the hidden inner chambers to the awareness of your sight:
you would see done by the shameless what a chaste brow could not even look upon; you would see what is a crime even to behold; you would see what those, maddened by the frenzy of vices, deny they have done and yet hasten to do. With insane lusts they rush, man upon man. Things are done which cannot please even those who do them. I lie, unless one who is such rebukes others, a base man defames the base, and believes himself to have escaped notice as an accomplice — as though one's own conscience were not enough. The same men are accusers in public, defendants in secret, censors and culprits alike against their very selves: they condemn abroad what they practice within, they willingly admit what, when they have admitted, they make a charge against. Audacity working outright with vices, and shamelessness agreeing with the shameless. I would not have you wonder at the things that such men speak:
with such a mouth, whatever is now offended by the voice is the lesser thing. But for you, after the treacherous ways, after the manifold battles scattered over the whole world, after the spectacles whether bloody or shameful, after the disgraces of lusts whether prostituted in brothels or walled in within domestic walls — of which the more secret the guilt, the greater the audacity — the forum perhaps may seem immune, as being free from assailing injuries and polluted by no contacts of evils. Bend your gaze thither: there you will find more things to detest, the more you will turn your eyes away from there. Though the laws be inscribed on the Twelve Tables, and the statutes posted up on public bronze: things proscribed — yet amid the very laws there is transgression, amid the statutes there is sinning; innocence is not preserved even there where it is defended.
The fury of the discordant rages by turns, and, peace being broken even among the togas, the forum bellows madly with lawsuits. There the lance and the sword and the executioner are at hand, the claw that digs out, the rack that stretches, the fire that burns up — for one man's body more torments than members. Who amid these things may truly bring aid? The advocate? But he plays false and deceives. The judge? But he sells his sentence. He who sits to avenge crimes commits them, and, that the innocent defendant may perish, the judge becomes the guilty one. Crimes blaze everywhere, and on all sides, through wicked minds, the hurtful venom works by a multiform kind of sinning. This man forges a will, that man writes a forgery with capital fraud: here children are barred from inheritances, there the goods are bestowed on strangers:
the enemy accuses, the false accuser assails, the witness defames. On both sides there ranges, into the lie of fabricated charges, the venal audacity of a prostituted voice, while meanwhile the guilty do not even perish along with the innocent. There is no fear of the laws, no dread of the investigator, of the judge: what can be bought off is not feared. To be innocent now among the guilty is a crime: whoever does not imitate the wicked gives offense. The laws have consented to sins, and what is public has begun to be lawful. What modesty in affairs can there be there, what integrity can exist, where those who would condemn the wicked are wanting, and only those who are to be condemned present themselves to you?
But lest we seem perhaps to choose worse things, and out of a zeal for destroying to lead your eyes through those things whose sad and to-be-shunned aspect offends the face and countenance of a better conscience: now I will show you those things which secular ignorance esteems as goods. There too you will behold things to be fled. Whatever honors you think there are, whatever fasces, whatever affluence in riches, whatever power in camps, the show in the magistrate's purple, the power in the license of supremacy: the hidden venom of flattering evils is there, and the face of a smiling wickedness is indeed glad, but it is the enticing deceit of a concealed calamity.
It is a kind of poison, where, the deadly juices being sprinkled with sweetness by the craft of deceiving, with a medicated savor the cup seems to be what is taken: but once the thing is drunk down, the destruction once swallowed ranges abroad. To be sure, you see that man who, conspicuous in brighter attire, seems to himself to glitter in purple: by what filth he has bought this, that he may glitter — what haughty arrogances he has first endured, what proud doors the early-morning saluter has besieged, how many insolent footprints of the swollen he has gone before, escorted into the wedges of his clients, that he himself, even when saluted, might afterward have a retinue go before him as a companion-throng — homage owed not to the man but to the office. For it was not by his character that he deserved to be honored, but by his fasces. In short, you may see the base ends of such men.
When the time-serving flatterer, the snatcher at occasions, has departed, when the deserting hanger-on has befouled the now-private man's defenseless flank: then the wounds of the torn household strike the conscience, then are recognized the losses of the household substance drained dry, by which the favor of the crowd was bought and, by fleeting and empty votes, the popular breeze was sought. A foolish and vain expense altogether, to have wished to procure, by the pleasure of a frustrating spectacle, that which neither the people would accept and the magistrate would lose.
But even those whom you suppose to be rich, joining estate to estate and, the poor being shut out from the boundary, extending their fields without limits and without bounds more widely; for whom there is the greatest weight of silver and of gold and either heaped-up ramparts or buried piles of vast moneys — these too, amid their riches, the solicitude of an uncertain thought tortures, trembling, lest a robber lay waste, lest an assassin assail, lest the hostile envy of anyone wealthier disquiet them with calumnious lawsuits.
No food, no sleep falls to him in security; he sighs at the banquet, though he drink from a jeweled cup, and when a softer couch has buried his body, languid with feasting, in its deep bosom, he keeps watch upon the down, nor does the wretch understand that his sufferings are showy to himself, that he is held bound to his gold and possessed rather than possessing his riches; and — O detestable blindness of minds and the deep gloom of insane greed! — when he could unburden himself and lighten himself of his loads, he persists rather in brooding upon his anguishing fortunes, he persists in clinging obstinately to his penal heaps.
Thence there is no largess upon clients, no sharing with the needy; and they call their own the money which, as though another's, they guard shut up at home with anxious toil, out of which they impart nothing to friends, nothing to children, nothing, in short, to themselves: they possess only to this end, that another may not be allowed to possess; and — O how great a diversity of names! — they call those things goods, of which they have no use except for evil things. Or do you think even those men safe, those at least secure with stable firmness amid the trappings of honors and ample wealth, whom, glittering with the splendor of the royal court, the protection of watching arms stands around? Greater is the fear for them than for the rest. As much as that man is feared, so much is he compelled to fear.
Eminence exacts penalties from the more powerful alike, though he be hedged about by a band of attendants and guard his shut-in and protected flank with a numerous escort: as much as he does not allow his subjects to be secure, so much is it necessary that he too be not secure; his own power holds those very men whom it makes to be terrible: it smiles, that it may rage; it flatters, that it may deceive; it exalts, that it may cast down. By a kind of usury of harming, the more ample the sum of dignity and honors shall have been, so much the greater is the interest of penalties exacted. One peace, then, placid and faithful, one tranquility, one solid and firm security, is for him who, drawn out from these whirlwinds of a disquieting world, is established in the station of a saving harbor:
he lifts his eyes from the earth to heaven and, admitted to the gift of the Lord and now in mind near to his God, glories that whatever among others in human affairs seems lofty and great lies beneath his own conscience. He can now crave nothing, desire nothing of the world, who is greater than the world. How stable, how unshaken a protection it is, how a heavenly safeguard with perennial goods, to be loosed from the snares of the entangling world, to be cleansed from earthly dregs into the light of eternal immortality. Let him have seen what perilous destruction of the assailing enemy formerly ranged insidiously against us: we are compelled to love the more what we are to be, while it is granted both to know and to condemn what we were.
And for this there is no need of prices or of canvassing or of force, that the summit of a man's dignity or power may be brought forth by an elaborated effort: the gift of God is both gratuitous and easy. As of its own accord the sun rays forth, the day gives light, the spring waters, the rain bedews, so the heavenly Spirit pours itself in. After the soul, gazing on heaven, has known its own Author, higher than the sun and more sublime than all this earthly power, it begins to be that which it believes itself to be. Do you only — you whom now the heavenly warfare has signed in the spiritual camps — keep your discipline uncorrupted, keep it sober, with religious virtues. Let either prayer be assiduous with you or reading. Now speak with God, now let God speak with you. Let Him instruct you with His precepts, let Him dispose you.
Whom He has made rich, no one shall make poor. There can now be no penury, when once the heavenly fullness has satisfied the breast. Now ceilings inlaid with gold and dwellings clothed with crusts of precious marble will seem mean to you, when you have known that you yourself are rather to be adorned, that you rather are to be embellished, that this house is more excellent to you which the Lord has taken His seat in, in the stead of a temple, in which the Holy Spirit has begun to dwell. Let us paint this house with the pigments of innocence, let us light it with the light of righteousness. This will never fall into ruin by the old age of long duration, nor be defiled by the fading of a wall's pigment or of gold. Fleeting are all things that are painted over, nor do they offer a stable confidence to their possessors, things which have not the truth of possession.
This abides with a perpetually living adornment, with honor entire, with splendor enduring. It cannot be abolished nor extinguished; it can only be shaped into something better when the body returns. These things meanwhile in brief, dearest Donatus. For although the wholesome hearing delights an easy patience concerning goodness, a mind solid in the Lord, a faith safe; and nothing is so pleasing to your ears as that which is pleasing toward the Lord — yet we ought to moderate the things to be said, both being joined together and being about to speak more often; and since now there is festal rest and the time is leisurely, whatever of the day remains, the sun now declining toward evening, let us pass this day joyfully, nor let even an hour of the banquet be without the grace of heaven. Let the sober banquet resound with psalms:
as your memory is retentive and your voice melodious, undertake this office after your custom. You feed your dearest friends the more, if there be for us a spiritual hearing, and if a religious sweetness allures the ears.