Moralia in Job 26

Argument. — 1. Cyriacus, patriarch of Constantinople, sends to St. Gregory an embassy and a letter. He replies to it. 2. — Encomium of Cyriacus. — 3. Those are reproved who had usurped Holy Scripture to praise him. — 4. The legates of Cyriacus are convicted of error by the Pope. — 5. The fable of Trajan freed by the prayers of St. Gregory is thence exploded. But especially from the Dialogues. — 6. Objections against the eternity of the punishments of hell are resolved. — 7. Why a sin, though ended, is punished without end. — 8. Why the saints do not pray for the damned. By the same reasoning it is proved that St. Gregory could not have prayed for Trajan. — 9. The evasion of John the Deacon is exploded. — 10. An objection taken from the Acts of St. Perpetua is met. (A.D. 596 and 597.) 1. Although John of Constantinople

had departed from the living in the month of January in the year 595, as we have already noted above (Chapter 1, no. 15), yet St. Gregory received the embassy and the synodical letter of his successor Cyriacus, writing about his own election and ordination, only after nearly twenty months. The letters of Cyriacus were carried, for honour's sake, by Georgius the presbyter and Theodorus the deacon. Replying to these, the Pope indeed praises Cyriacus for having fled pastoral solicitude out of love of quiet, but from that very thing he proves that he ought to have been promoted to the episcopal dignity: 'Because just as the place of governance must be denied to those who desire it, so it must be offered to those who flee it' (Book VII, ep. 4).

He therefore admonishes that charity toward one's neighbour is to be preferred to inward tranquillity, which he shows also by his own example; and he teaches by what means it can be guarded against, that the cares of the pastor should not utterly overwhelm the mind. As regards the confession of faith given by Cyriacus, the Pope approves it; nevertheless he doubts whether a certain Eudoxius ought to be reckoned among the heretics condemned by the four ecumenical synods; but Eulogius afterward removed his doubt and hesitation. Concerning the title 'ecumenical,' to be spurned, he touches on certain points. In another, shorter letter to Cyriacus, he testifies that his good qualities had long since been clear to him, namely while he was staying in the royal city. One despondent in soul from a weakness of conscience he raises up, saying:

'We know that the first virtue is the knowledge of one's weakness, and from this we gather that you can well fulfil the ministry you have undertaken, because you at least know your own weakness through humility. For we are all weak, but he is the weaker who is unable to consider his own weakness' (Book VII, ep. 5). 2. The most holy man congratulated the Emperor on the election of Cyriacus, that he had been so solicitous about giving the best shepherd to the Church of Constantinople (Book VII, ep. 6). We shall subjoin certain things from the letter to Maurice, from which it will be understood who Cyriacus was, and for what reason a successor was rather tardily given to John, who is not a little praised:

'It could be,' he says, 'of no small reward, that when John of holy memory was withdrawn from this light, your Piety long hesitated over ordaining a priest, and put it off for a somewhat longer time, since with fear of the almighty Lord you sought counsel, so that, namely, the cause of God should be disposed of with great fear. Whence I judge my brother and fellow-priest Cyriacus, whom your Piety's long deliberations have produced for that same order, to be exceedingly suited for pastoral governance. How solicitous and how well-exercised he was in administering ecclesiastical affairs some while ago, we all know. Whence I do not doubt that it was brought about by supernal dispensation:'

'that he who had well administered the least things should fittingly undertake the greater, and pass from the care of affairs to the governance of souls' (Book VIII, ep. 34). 3. At the ordination of Cyriacus, certain bishops, exulting too immoderately, had cried out: 'This is the day which the Lord hath made; let us be glad and rejoice therein' (Ps. 117:24), as though this patriarch were a sun by whose light the day had dawned. This usurpation of the words of Holy Scripture in flattering speech St. Gregory utterly condemned, as he signified to those bishops in his letters (Book VIII, ep. 7). But lest he be thought to have laboured under jealousy, and to have wished rather to draw to himself the praises bestowed on Cyriacus, he immediately endeavours to lighten the fault of this immoderate praise.

But how averse he was from excessive and immoderate praises — nay, from seeking and hunting after any praises whatsoever — he surely left attested a thousand times, and especially in this year, when he rebuked John, bishop of Syracuse, for having the reading of his own lucubrations presented at his table in the presence of strangers (ibid., ep. 9). 4. The legates of Cyriacus, on the testimony of the deacons of the Roman Church, had said: that Jesus Christ, descending to the lower regions, had saved all who there confessed Him to be God, and had freed them from the punishments due. 'Concerning this matter,' says the holy doctor, 'I wish your Charity to think far otherwise. For descending to the lower regions, He freed by His grace only those who both believed that He was to come,'

'and who held His precepts by living them.' But it is certain that after the Lord's incarnation, not even those can be saved who hold His faith and do not have the life of faith (Book VIII, ep. 15); which he goes on to demonstrate by many testimonies of Holy Scripture. 5. This passage alone would suffice to explode the little fable about Trajan, freed from the punishments of hell by the prayers of Gregory, which Paul and John the Deacon relate in his Life, Book II, chap. 44. For what? Could he indeed have poured out prayers to God for the deliverance of Trajan, a worshipper of idols and a persecutor of Christians even unto death, he who knew that one who had separated himself from God by living wickedly cannot be drawn to God after death?

for the eminent Doctor says this in express words. But this invention is far more forcibly refuted from the doctrine asserted in the Dialogues, Book IV, chap. 44. The question proposed in that place is: whether those who are assigned to the fires of Gehenna always burn; to which St. Gregory replies: 'It is assuredly certain, and is without hesitation true, that just as there is no end to the joy of the good, so there will be no end to the torment of the wicked. For since Truth says: The wicked shall go into everlasting punishment, but the just into life everlasting (Matt. 25:46); since that which He promised is true, that which God threatened will undoubtedly not be false.' 6. Peter objects to these things: 'What if someone should say:'

'He threatened eternal punishment to sinners for this reason, that He might restrain them from the perpetration of sins?' But the holy Doctor dissolves that objection, replying in these words: 'If that which He threatened is false, in order that He might correct from injustice, then also what He promised is false, in order that He might incite to justice. But who, even a madman, would presume to say this? And if He threatened what He was not going to fulfil, then, while we wish to make Him merciful, we are compelled to preach Him deceitful — which it is impious to say.' 7. Peter, sufficiently understanding that satisfaction has been given him by this reply, proposes another knot to be untied: 'I would wish to know,' he says, 'how it is just that a fault which has been perpetrated with an end should be punished without end.' To which the most wise master replies:

'This would rightly be said, if the strict judge weighed not the hearts of men but their deeds. For the wicked sinned with an end because they lived with an end. For they would certainly have wished, if they had been able, to live without end, that they might be able to sin without end. For they show that they desire always to live in sin, who never cease to sin while they live. It belongs, therefore, to the great justice of the Judge, that those should never lack punishment who in this life never wished to lack sin.' An excellent argument, by which the eternity of punishments is proved against the despisers of religion, who are wont to cavil at this dogma so that they may sin more freely. Peter, however, not yet crushed by the weight of this argument, presses still more subtly:

'But no just person is nourished by cruelty, and a delinquent servant is ordered to be beaten by a just master for this reason, that he may be corrected from his wickedness. To this end, therefore, he is scourged, that he ought to be amended. But the wicked, delivered to the fires of Gehenna, if they do not attain to correction, to what end will they always burn?' The Doctor replies to the disciple: 'Almighty God, because He is loving, is not nourished by the torment of the wretched; but because He is just, He is not for ever appeased from the punishment of the wicked. Yet all the wicked assigned to eternal punishment are indeed punished for their own iniquity, and nevertheless will burn to some end, namely, that all the just may both see in God the joys which they receive, and may behold in those wicked the punishments which they have escaped:'

'so that they may acknowledge themselves so much the more, for eternity, debtors of the divine grace, the more they behold, for eternity, evils punished which by His help they overcame.' 8. To one weighing these things, in what manner can it come into his mind that Gregory, so wise, so teaching, ever poured out prayers for the emperor Trajan, whom, on account of his infidelity and the persecution stirred up against Christians (to say nothing meanwhile of other matters), he did not doubt to have been condemned to eternal punishments? But what follows leaves not even the slightest difficulty on that subject. For Peter asks: 'And where is it that they are saints, if for their enemies whom they then see burning, they will not pray, to whom indeed it was said: Pray for your enemies? (Matt.'

'5:44.)' To which the most wise Doctor replies thus: 'They pray for their enemies at the time when they can convert their hearts to fruitful penitence, and by that very conversion save them. For what else is to be prayed for enemies, except this which the Apostle says: That God may give them repentance to know the truth, and that they may recover from the snares of the devil, by whom they are held captive to his will? (2 Tim. 2:25.) And how will they then pray for those who can by no means any longer be changed from iniquity to the works of justice? Therefore the same cause exists, why prayer is not then made for men condemned to eternal fire, which is now also the cause that prayer is not made for the devil and his angels assigned to eternal punishment.'

'The same cause exists also now, why holy men do not pray for unfaithful and impious men who have died, except that, on behalf of those whom they already know to have been assigned to eternal punishment, they shrink from having the merit of their prayer rendered void before the sight of the just Judge. But if even now the living just have no compassion at all upon the dead and damned unjust — at a time when they themselves still know that they endure something judgeable concerning their own flesh — how much more, then, when they more strictly behold the torments of the wicked, when, stripped of every vice of corruption, they will cling more nearly and more closely to justice itself?'

'For thus their minds, through the fact that they cleave to the most just Judge, are so absorbed by the force of that strictness, that it in no way pleases them to have anything which is at variance with the subtlety of His eternal rule.' To one reading these things, can the opinion of St. Gregory be doubtful or obscure, both concerning the eternity of the punishments of hell, and concerning the denial of all prayers for those whom, without any hesitation, we know to be assigned to punishments of this kind? 9. In order to elude or lighten the force of this argument, John the Deacon devised this evasion: namely, that Gregory did not by entreaty obtain Trajan's deliverance, but wept for it — as though tears poured forth before God for the sake of obtaining something were not prayers, and indeed most efficacious ones.

He adds that Trajan was so freed from the torments of hell that he nevertheless remained in hell, and was not carried up to those above. But the holy Doctor's reasoning, as well as all the testimonies of Holy Scripture adduced by him, prove not only the eternal remaining of the damned in hell, but also their burning. Nor is it permitted to imagine that the holy Doctor held a twofold opinion on this question at different times: for, first, he could not have been ignorant of what the doctrine of the sacred writings and of the Church was on this matter; secondly, he held the same thing consistently in almost all his works, though elaborated at different times, namely in the Morals, Book XXXIV, no.

34, in the Dialogues, and in the letter already praised, which afforded the occasion for this little dissertation, on account of the error of the legates of Cyriacus refuted in it. Moreover, this opinion, which is wont to be attributed to Origen, had already been attacked by Augustine and Basil the Great. (See Book XXI of the City of God, chap. 2; Short Rules, question 267.) 10. What is read in the Acts of St. Perpetua (Patrology, vol. III), namely that she prayed for her brother Dinocrates, and thus freed him from the punishments with which he was being tormented in a dark place, in no way favours the opinion which we, after Gregory, are attacking. For it proves only that the dead assigned to the torments of purgatory on account of light sins committed after baptism can, by the prayers of the faithful, be delivered from them.

This response Augustine furnishes in Book I On the Origin of the Soul, chap. 10, and Book III, chap. 9, where he says that Dinocrates suffered some punishments on account of certain sins committed after baptism. Indeed, since he was seven years old, he could have lied, or stained his soul with some other light offence. But that he had been baptized before death cannot be denied, since Perpetua herself testifies that her whole family, except her father, practised the religion of Christ.