For when I am weak, then am I stronger, and the power of the spirit is made perfect in the weakness of the flesh. The apostle too suffers something that he does not wish, for which he beseeches the Lord three times. But it is said to him: 'My grace is sufficient for thee,' and, to humble the pride arising from the revelations, a certain monitor of human frailty is applied, after the likeness of triumphing generals, to whom a companion clung behind in the chariot, at each acclamation of the citizens saying: 'Remember thou art a man.' But why should that be hard which must at some time be suffered? We grieve that someone has died: were we then born for this, that we should remain eternal? Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Peter, James and John, Paul the vessel of election, and above all the Son of God, dies:
and we are indignant that someone should depart from the body, who perhaps was snatched away for this very reason, lest wickedness should change his understanding? For his soul was pleasing to God; therefore He hastened to lead him out of the midst of iniquity, lest he should stray by devious windings on the long journey of life. Let the dead be mourned, but the one whom Gehenna receives, whom Tartarus devours, for whose punishment the eternal fire boils up. But we, whose departure a throng of angels accompanies, whom Christ comes to meet, should rather be grieved if we should dwell too long in this tabernacle of death. For, as long as we tarry here, we are pilgrims away from the Lord; let that, let that longing hold us: 'Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged;'
'I have dwelt with the inhabitants of Kedar, my soul has long been a pilgrim.' If Kedar means 'darkness,' and this world is darkness, because 'the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not,' let us congratulate our Blesilla, who has migrated from darkness to light, and, amid the ardor of a faith just beginning, received the crown of a completed work. Truly, if — which may God turn away from His own — an untimely death had snatched her away while she was thinking of worldly desire and the delights of this present life, she would have had to be lamented and bewailed with every fountain of tears.
But now, since by the favor of Christ she washed herself scarcely four months ago in a kind of second baptism of her resolve, and lived thereafter so as ever, treading the world underfoot, to think upon the monastery — do you not fear that the Savior may say to you: 'Are you angry, Paula, that your daughter has become my daughter? Are you indignant at my judgment, and by rebellious tears do you grudge me my possession of her? For you know what I purpose concerning you and concerning the rest of your kin. You deny yourself food, not from zeal for fasting but from grief. I do not love such frugality; these fasts are my adversary's. I receive no soul that is parted from the body against my will. Let foolish philosophy have such martyrs as these: Zeno, Cleombrotus, or Cato.'
'My Spirit rests upon none but the humble and the quiet and him who trembles at my words. Is this what you promised me a monastery for — that by a garb set apart from the other matrons you might seem to yourself somewhat more religious? That mind which mourns belongs to silken garments. You are cut short and you die, and, as though you were not to come into my hands, you flee the cruel judge. Jonah too once fled, that spirited prophet, yet even in the deep of the sea he was mine. If you believed your daughter to be alive, you would never mourn that she has passed to better things. This is what I commanded through my apostle, that you should not grieve over those who sleep after the manner of the Gentiles. Blush: you are outdone in comparison with a heathen woman. The devil's handmaid is better than mine.'
She imagines her unbelieving husband translated into heaven; you either do not believe, or do not wish, that your daughter dwells with me. But you say: 'How can you forbid me to mourn, when even Jacob wept for Joseph in sackcloth, and, when all his kinsfolk gathered to him, refused to be comforted, saying: I will go down mourning to my son into the netherworld; and when David bewailed Absalom with covered head, repeating: My son Absalom, my son Absalom! Would that I might die for you, Absalom, my son! and when solemn mourning was rendered also for Moses and Aaron and the other saints?' To these things the answer is very easy: that Jacob mourned a son whom he supposed slain, and to whom he himself too was to descend into the netherworld, saying:
'I will go down mourning to my son into the netherworld' — because Christ had not yet broken open the gate of paradise, his blood had not yet quenched that flaming sword and the wheeling of the guardian cherubim (whence Abraham too, though in a place of refreshment, is nevertheless written to be among the dead with Lazarus); and that David justly wept for his parricide son, whereas for the other little child — after he could not obtain that it should live — he did not weep, because he knew that it had not sinned.
As for Moses and Aaron, that mourning was rendered them according to ancient custom is no wonder, since even in the Acts of the Apostles, when the Gospel was already shining forth, the brethren at Jerusalem made great mourning for Stephen; and surely 'great mourning' is to be understood not in the swooning of the mourners, as you suppose, but in the pomp of the funeral and the throng of the obsequies. In fine, Scripture speaks thus of Jacob: And Joseph went up to bury his father, and there went up with him all the servants of Pharaoh and all the elders of his house and all the elders of the land of Egypt and all the house of Joseph and his brethren. And a little after: And there went up with him chariots and horsemen, and the company was exceeding great. And then:
And they mourned him with a great and exceeding strong lamentation. This solemn mourning does not enjoin long weeping upon the Egyptians, but displays the adornment of the funeral. In the same manner it is plain that Aaron too and Moses were wept for. I cannot sufficiently praise the mysteries of Scripture, and marvel at the divine sense in words that are, though simple: what it means that Moses is bewailed, and that Joshua son of Nun, a holy man, is recorded to have been buried, and yet is not written to have been wept for. Surely it is this: that under Moses — that is, under the old law — all were held bound by the sentence of Adam's sin, and, descending to the netherworld, tears consequently followed them, according to the apostle who says: And death reigned from Adam unto Moses, even over those who had not sinned;
but under Jesus — that is, under the Gospel — through whom paradise was opened, joys attend death. To this day the Jews weep, and, with bare feet, wallowing in ashes, they lie upon sackcloth; and, lest anything be wanting to their superstition, by the most empty rite of the Pharisees they take their first food of lentils, showing forsooth by what dish they lost their birthright. But deservedly so, because, not believing in the Lord's resurrection, they are being prepared for the coming of Antichrist. But we, who have put on Christ and have become, according to the apostle, a royal and priestly race, ought not to be saddened over the dead. And Moses said, it says, to Aaron and Eleazar and Ithamar his sons who were left:
You shall not uncover your head nor rend your garments, lest you die and wrath come upon the whole congregation. Do not, it says, rend your garments and display Gentile mourning, lest you die. Our death is sin. And — what may perhaps seem cruel to someone, but is necessary for faith — in the same book of Leviticus it is written how the high priest is forbidden to go to his dead father, mother, brothers, or children, namely lest the soul, being at leisure for God's sacrifices and wholly occupied in his mysteries, be hindered by any affection. Is not the selfsame thing enjoined, in other words, in the Gospel, that the disciple should not bid farewell to his house, that he should not render burial to his dead father?
And, it says, he shall not go forth from the sanctuary, and the sanctification of his God shall not be defiled, because the holy oil of anointing from God is upon him. Certainly, after we have believed in Christ and, having received the oil of his anointing, carry him within us, we ought not to go forth from the temple — that is, from the Christian purpose — nor to go outside, namely to mingle with the unbelief of the Gentiles, but ever to be within, ministering to the will of the Lord. These things I have said for this reason, lest ignorance of the Scriptures should furnish you an authority for mourning and you should seem to err with reason. And thus far I have spoken as though I were addressing one of the common Christian crowd.
But now, since I know that you have renounced the whole world and that, having cast off and trodden underfoot its delights, you give yourself daily to prayer, fasts, and reading; since after the example of Abraham you long to go forth from your land and from your kindred, that, having left the Chaldeans and Mesopotamia behind, you may enter the land of promise; since you have either lavished all your little substance upon the poor, or, being dead to the world, have given it to your children before your death — I marvel that you do things which, if others did them, would seem worthy of reproof. There returns to your memory her converse, her caresses, her speech, her companionship, and you cannot bear to be without these. We forgive a mother's tears, but we seek a measure in grief. If I consider you as a parent, I do not reproach you for weeping;
but if I consider you a Christian, and a Christian nun, in such persons the mother is excluded. The wound is fresh, and this touch by which I soothe it does not so much heal as it inflames; yet, that which is to be assuaged by time, why is it not overcome by reason? For Naomi too, fleeing famine into the land of Moab, lost both her husband and her sons; and when she was destitute of the help of her own, Ruth the foreigner did not depart from her side. See how great is the merit of having furnished comfort to the forsaken: from her seed Christ arises. Consider how much Job endured, and you will see — you being far too delicate! — that, with eyes lifted to heaven, amid the ruin of his house, the pains of his ulcer, countless bereavements, and at the last his wife's snares, he kept an unconquered patience.
I know what you will answer: that this befell him, as a righteous man, for a proving. Then do you too choose which of two things you will: either you are holy and are being proved, or you are a sinner and complain unjustly, since you endure less than you deserve. Why should I rehearse old examples? Follow present ones. Holy Melania, the true nobility of our age among Christians — with whom may the Lord grant to you and me to have a portion on his day — while her husband's poor body was still warm and not yet buried, lost two sons at once. I am about to tell a thing incredible, yet, with Christ as witness, not false. Who would not then have supposed that she would, in frenzied fashion, with disheveled hair and rent garment, fall upon her lacerated breast? Not a drop of tears flowed;
she stood unmoved and, prostrate at the feet of Christ, as though she held him, she smiled: 'The more readily shall I serve you, Lord, since you have freed me from so great a burden.' But perhaps she is surpassed in other things? Nay rather, with what mind she despised those sons she afterward proved in her one remaining son, when, having yielded up all the possession she had, she sailed to Jerusalem as winter was already coming on. Spare, I beg you, yourself; spare your daughter now reigning with Christ; spare at least your Eustochium, whose still tender age and almost raw infancy is guided under your teaching. The devil now rages, and because he sees one of your children triumphing, grieving that he is trodden down, he seeks in her who remains the victory which he has already lost in her who has gone before.
Great devotion toward one's own is impiety toward God. Abraham joyfully slays his only son, and do you complain that one of several has been crowned? I cannot utter without a groan what I am about to say. When they carried you swooning from the midst of the funeral pomp, the people muttered this among themselves: 'Is this not what we have often said? She grieves for a daughter killed by fasting, and that she did not, even from her second marriage, keep grandchildren. How long shall the detestable race of monks not be driven from the city, not overwhelmed with stones, not hurled into the waves? They have seduced a pitiable matron, who, that she was unwilling to be a nun, is proved by this: that no heathen woman ever so wept for her children.'
What sadness do you think Christ felt at those words, how did Satan exult, who now, hastening to snatch away your soul and setting before you the allurements of a pious grief — while your daughter's image is ever turning before your eyes — desires at once to slay the mother of the victorious one and to invade the solitude of the sister left behind? I speak not to terrify you, but, as the Lord is my witness, as though standing before his tribunal, I address you in these words. Detestable are those tears, full of sacrilege, most full of unbelief, which have no measure, which come even to the neighborhood of death. You howl and cry out, and, as though kindled by certain torches, so far as in you lies, you are ever your own murderer.
But to such a one the merciful Jesus enters and says: 'Why do you weep? The girl is not dead, but sleeps.' Let the bystanders laugh: that is the unbelief of the Jews. Nay, if you will roll upon your daughter's tomb, the angels will rebuke you: 'Why do you seek the living among the dead?' And because Mary Magdalene had done this — after she recognized the voice of the Lord calling her, prostrate at his feet she heard: Touch me not; for I have not yet ascended to my Father — that is: 'You do not deserve to touch the risen one whom you suppose dead in the tomb.' What crosses do you think our Blesilla now suffers, what torments she bears, because she sees Christ somewhat angered with you? She now cries out to you as you mourn:
'If ever you loved me, mother, if I sucked your breasts, if I was formed by your admonitions, do not envy my glory, do not so act that we be separated from one another forever. Do you think I am alone? For your sake I have Mary, the mother of the Lord. Many I see here whom I knew not before. Oh, how much better is this company! I have Anna, who once prophesied in the Gospel; and — that you may rejoice the more — the labor of so many years I have attained in three months. We have received one and the same palm of chastity. Do you pity me because I left the world? But I grieve for your lot, whom the prison of this age still shuts in, whom, daily fighting in the battle-line, now anger, now avarice, now lust, now the incitements of divers vices drag down to ruin.
If you wish to be my mother, take care to please Christ. I do not acknowledge a mother displeasing to my Lord.' She speaks these and many other things which I pass over in silence, and she prays God for you; and for me — that I may be secure concerning her mind — she obtains pardon of my sins, because I admonished her, because I exhorted her, because to keep her safe I took upon myself the ill will of her kinsfolk. And so, while the spirit rules these limbs, while I enjoy the passage of this life, I pledge, I promise, I vow: her my tongue shall resound, to her my labors shall be dedicated, for her my talent shall sweat. There shall be no page that does not sound with Blesilla. Wherever the monuments of my speech shall reach, she shall travel abroad together with my little works. Fixed in my mind, virgins, widows, monks, and priests shall read of her.
Eternal memory shall recompense the brief span of life. She who lives with Christ in heaven shall also live on in the mouths of men. The present age shall pass, and the ages yet to come shall follow, which shall judge without love and without envy: between the name of Paula and Eustochium hers shall be set in the midst. Never shall she die in my books. She shall ever hear me speaking with her sister and with her mother. XL. TO MARCELLA, CONCERNING ONASUS. The physicians whom they call surgeons are counted cruel, and are wretched. Is it not misery to feel pain at others' wounds and to cut dead flesh with a merciful knife? Not to shrink, as the healer, from what he himself who suffers shrinks from, and to be reckoned an enemy? Such is nature's way, that truth is bitter, while vices are esteemed sweet.
Isaiah does not blush to walk naked as a figure of the captivity to come; Jeremiah is sent from the midst of Jerusalem to the Euphrates, the river of Mesopotamia, to lay there — among hostile nations, where the Assyrian is and the camps of the Chaldeans are — the linen girdle to be left to rot; Ezekiel is commanded to eat bread sprinkled with every kind of seed, baked first over human dung, then over cow dung, and beholds his wife's death with dry eyes; Amos is driven out of Samaria: why, I ask? Surely for this reason: because these spiritual surgeons, cutting away the vices of sinners, were exhorting them to repentance. The apostle Paul says: I have become your enemy by telling you the truth. And because the Savior's utterances seemed hard, very many of his disciples went back.
Hence it is no wonder if we too, in disparaging vices, offend very many. I have resolved to cut off a stinking nose: let him who is scrofulous be afraid. I mean to pluck at a chattering little crow: let the crow understand that she is somewhat rancid. Is there but one man in the Roman world who has nostrils mutilated by a shameful wound? Is Onasus of Segesta the only one who weighs out hollow words, swollen after the fashion of bladders, with puffed-out cheeks? I say that certain men have risen to some rank or other by crime, perjury, and falsehood: what is that to you, who know yourself innocent? I laugh at an advocate who has need of a patron; I sneer with my nose at eloquence worth a farthing: what is that to you, who are eloquent? I mean to inveigh against money-grubbing priests: you, who are rich, why are you angry?
I wish the lame Vulcan to burn in his own fires: are you his guest or neighbor, that you strive to ward off the conflagration from the idol's shrine? It pleases me to laugh at ghosts, at the screech-owl, at the horned owl, at the portents of the Nile: whatever is said, you think it said against you. Against whatever vice the point of my pen is turned, you cry out that you are meant; with clenched fist you summon me to law, and foolishly arraign a satirical writer in prose. Or do you think yourself handsome for this reason, that you are called by a lucky name? As if a grove ('lucus') were not so called precisely because it gives least light, and the Parcae ('the Sparers') from the fact that they by no means spare, and the Furies are called Eumenides ('the Kindly Ones'), and Ethiopians are commonly called 'the silvery ones.' But if you will ever be angered at the portrayal of foul things, then with Persius I shall sing you handsome:
'May king and queen desire you for a son-in-law, may the maidens carry you off: whatever you tread upon, may it turn to a rose.' Yet I will give you counsel by hiding which things you may appear the more comely: let your nose not be seen upon your face, let your speech not sound when you speak; and thus you will be able to seem both handsome and eloquent. XLI. TO MARCELLA. As for the testimonies, gathered from the Gospel of John, which a certain follower of Montanus has thrust upon you — in which our Savior promises that he will go to the Father and will send the Paraclete — at what time they were promised, and at what time they were fulfilled, the Acts of the Apostles bears witness:
[it testifies] that on the tenth day after the Lord's ascension — that is, the fiftieth after the resurrection — the Holy Spirit descended, and the tongues of the believers were divided, so that each one spoke in the language of all the nations; when certain still-unbelieving men asserted that they were drunk with new wine, and Peter, standing in the midst of the apostles and of the whole assembly, said: Men of Judea, and all you who dwell in Jerusalem, be this known to you and give ear to my words. For these are not drunk, as you suppose — for it is the third hour of the day — but this is that which was spoken through the prophet Joel:
In the last days, says the Lord, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh, and their sons and their daughters shall prophesy, and the young men shall see visions, and the old men shall dream dreams; and indeed upon my menservants and maidservants I will pour out of my Spirit. If, then, the apostle Peter — upon whom the Lord founded his Church — recorded that both the prophecy and the promise of the Lord were fulfilled at that time, how can we claim another time for ourselves?
But if they choose to reply that Philip's four daughters afterward prophesied, and that the prophet Agabus is found, and that among the divisions of the Spirit — as the apostle writes — prophets too were formed among the apostles and teachers, and that Paul himself prophesied many things concerning future heresies and the end of the age: let them know that by us prophecy is not so much rejected — the prophecy that is sealed by the Lord's passion — as that those men are not received who do not agree with the authority of the Old and New Scripture. First, we differ in the rule of faith. We set the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit each in his own person, though we join them in substance; they, following the dogma of Sabellius, force the Trinity into the narrow limits of a single person.
We do not so much seek second marriages as we permit them, since Paul commands that young widows should marry; they hold repeated marriages so wicked that whoever does this is counted an adulterer. We fast one Lent according to the tradition of the apostles, with the whole world in accord with us; they keep three Lents in the year, as though three Saviors had suffered — not that one may not fast throughout the whole year, save at Pentecost, but that it is one thing to offer a gift by necessity, another by free will. Among us the bishops hold the place of the apostles; among them the bishop is third.
For they have as their first the patriarchs from Pepuza in Phrygia; as second, those whom they call cenones (associates); and thus the bishops are rolled down to the third — that is, almost the last — rank, as though from this the religion should become the more distinguished, if what among us is first should among them be last. They bar the doors of the Church against almost every fault; we read daily: I prefer the repentance of a sinner to his death; and: Shall he that falls not rise again? The Lord says: Turn to me, you returning sons, and I will heal your bruises.
They are rigid, however, not because they themselves do not sin worse things, but because this is the difference between us and them: that they, as though righteous, blush to confess their sins, while we, in doing penance, more easily earn pardon. I pass over the wicked mysteries said to be compounded of a suckling infant and of a martyr about to live. I prefer not to believe iniquitous things; let all that pertains to blood be false. But the open blasphemy must be refuted of those who say that God first willed, in the Old Testament through Moses and the prophets, to save the world; and that because he could not accomplish this, [he took] a body,
namely took a body from the Virgin and, in Christ, under the appearance of the Son, preaching, underwent death for us; and that, because by these two stages he could not save the world, at last through the Holy Spirit he descended into Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla, mad women, and possessed a fullness which Paul did not have when he said: We know in part and we prophesy in part, and: Now we see through a glass darkly — [that fullness] the castrated and half-man Montanus possessed. These things need no refutation;
to have exposed their perfidy is to have overcome it; nor is it necessary that the briefer discourse of a letter should overthrow each single raving they bring forth, since you yourself, holding the Scriptures thoroughly, have not been so much moved by their questions as you have wished to inquire of me what I thought. XLII. TO MARCELLA, ON THE UNPARDONABLE BLASPHEMY AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT. The little question you sent is brief, and the answer is plain. For if, concerning that which is written in the Gospel — Whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him;
but he who shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this age nor in that to come — Novatian affirms that no one can sin against the Holy Spirit except him who is a Christian and afterward has denied [the faith]. [If so,] it is plain that the Jews, who at that time were blaspheming, are not held guilty of the sin of blasphemy — they who, impious husbandmen, having killed the prophets, were plotting the Lord's murder, and were so far lost that the Son of God answered that he had come to save them.
Hence they must be refuted from the whole tenor of Scripture itself: that the blasphemy is called unpardonable, not for those who, compelled by tortures and disemboweled by various torments, have denied the Lord, but for those who, though they see in the miracles the works of God, slander them and cry aloud that the power belongs to a demon, and that all the signs which have been wrought pertain not to the divine majesty but to the devil. Hence too the Savior directs the whole argument of his answer to this end: to teach that Satan cannot be cast out by Satan, and that his kingdom is not divided against itself. For since it is the devil's endeavor to harm God's creature, how can it belong to the same will to heal the sick and to drive himself out of the bodies he possesses?
Let Novatian therefore prove that any one of those who were compelled to sacrifice before the judge's tribunal answered that all the things written in the Gospel were accomplished not by the Son of God but by Beelzebub, prince of demons; and then he will be able to prove that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unpardonable. But that we may ask something yet more acutely, let them answer what it is to speak against the Son of Man and to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. For I assert, according to that very sense, that those who denied Christ under persecution spoke against the Son of Man and did not blaspheme against the Holy Spirit.
For he who, being asked whether he is a Christian, answers that he is not a Christian, certainly, by denying Christ — that is, the Son of Man — has done no injury to the Holy Spirit. But if, by denying Christ, he denied also the Spirit, let the heretic explain how he who has denied the Son of Man does not sin against the Spirit. Or if he thinks that in this place the Holy Spirit is to be understood as the Father, no mention of the Father was made by the denier when he denied. The apostle Peter, at the time when, terrified by the maidservant's question, he denied the Lord — does he seem to have committed the sin against the Son of Man, or against the Holy Spirit? If that which he said,
'I know not the man' — if one should ridiculously wish to interpret that he denied not Christ but a man, he will make the Savior a liar, who had foretold that he himself, that is the Son of God, would be denied. But if he denied the Son of God — whence he also wept bitterly and afterward wiped out his threefold denial by a threefold confession — it is plain that this cannot be the unremitted sin against the Holy Spirit, which involves the blasphemy of, when you see God in the miracles, slandering them as Beelzebub's in the deeds. Let him therefore show that some denier called Christ 'Beelzebub,' and I will freely grant that a denier cannot obtain pardon.