What is fairer than a soul which is called the daughter of God and seeks no adornments from without? She believes in Christ and, enriched by this aspiration, goes forth to the Bridegroom, having as her Lord the same whom she has as her Husband. What straits marriage holds you learned in your very wedding, and you have been sated to the point of nausea as it were on the flesh of quails. Your throat has tasted the most bitter gall; you have disgorged the souring and diseased food, you have relieved your seething stomach: why do you wish again to take in what has been harmful to you? A dog returning to its vomit, and a sow to the wallowing in the mire. Even brute animals and wandering birds do not fall twice into the same snares and nets.
Or do you fear that the Furian offspring may fail, and that your father may not have from you a little boy to crawl on his breast and befoul his neck with dung? Why not? All women who have had marriages have children, and those to whom offspring were born have answered to their own stock! Did Cicero's son display his father in eloquence? Did your Cornelia, an example at once of chastity and of fruitfulness, rejoice that she had begotten her Gracchi? It is ridiculous to hope for a certainty which you see many both not have and, when they have had it, have lost. To whom do you leave such great riches? To Christ, who cannot die. Whom will you have as your heir? The very one whom you have also as your Lord. Your father will be saddened, but Christ will rejoice; your household will mourn, but the angels will give thanks.
Let your father do what he will with his own substance: you are not his to whom you were born, but his to whom you were reborn, and who redeemed you at a great price, with his own blood. Beware of nurses and bearers and wine-bibbing creatures of that sort, who desire to sate their belly from your hide. They advise not what may profit you, but what may profit themselves, and they often yap out that line: 'Will you alone, always mourning, wear away your youth, and know neither sweet children nor the rewards of Venus?' Where there is chastity and holiness, there is frugality; where there is frugality, there is loss to the servants. Whatever they cannot carry off they reckon as taken from themselves, and they consider not from how much, but how much they receive. Wherever they see a Christian, straightway comes that cry from the crossroads: 'A Greekling! An impostor!'
These sow the foulest rumours, and what has issued from themselves they pretend to have heard from others, being at once the authors and the exaggerators. Thence rumour springs from a lie, which, when it has reached the matrons and been fanned by their tongues, penetrates the provinces. You may see very many raging with rabid mouth and, with painted face and viperish eyes and pumice-smoothed teeth, carping at Christians. Here some woman, about whose shoulders is a hyacinth-coloured mantle, blares out something rancid, lisping through her nose, and trips up her words with a delicate palate. The whole chorus chimes in, and all the benches bark. There join in those of our own order, who both are gnawed and gnaw, talkative against us, mute in their own defence;
as though they themselves were something other than monks, and as though whatever is said against monks did not redound upon the clergy, who are the fathers of monks. The loss of the flock is the shepherd's disgrace; just as, on the other side, the life of that monk is praised who holds the priests of Christ in veneration and does not detract from the rank through which he was made a Christian. These things I have spoken, my daughter in Christ, not doubting of your resolve — for you would never have asked for an exhortatory letter if you were wavering concerning the good of single marriage — but that you might understand the wickedness of the little servants who carry you about for sale, and the snares of your kinsfolk, and the pious error of your parent, to whom, while I grant love toward you, I do not concede knowledge of love, saying something with the apostle:
I bear them witness that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. Rather imitate — for let me repeat this same thing again and again — your holy mother, of whom, as often as I recall her, there comes to mind her ardour for Christ, her pallor from fasting, her almsgiving to the poor, her attendance upon the servants of God, her humility both of heart and of dress, and in all things her moderate speech. Let your father, whom I name for honour's sake — not because he is of consular and patrician rank, but because he is a Christian — fulfil his name and rejoice that he has begotten a daughter for Christ, not for the world; nay rather, let him grieve that you have both lost your virginity in vain and forfeited the fruits of marriage. Where is the husband whom he gave you?
Even if he had been lovable, even if good, death would have ended all things and destruction would have loosed the bond of the flesh. Seize the occasion, I beg you, and make a virtue of necessity. In Christians the beginnings are not sought, but the end: Paul began badly, but ended well; Judas's first steps are praised, but his end is condemned for betrayal. Read Ezekiel: 'The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him in whatever day he shall have sinned, and the impiety of the impious shall not hurt him in whatever day he shall have been converted from his impiety.' This is the ladder of Jacob, by which the angels ascend and descend, upon which the Lord leans, stretching out his hand to the weary and supporting the wearied steps of those who climb by the contemplation of himself.
But, just as he does not wish the death of the sinner, but only that he should turn and live, so he hates the lukewarm, and they quickly cause him nausea. To whom more is forgiven, he loves more. That harlot in the Gospel, baptized with her own tears and with the hair with which she had before deceived many, wiping the feet of the Lord, was saved. She had no crimped headdresses, no creaking little shoes, no eye-sockets blackened with antimony; the fouler she was, the fairer. What has rouge and white-lead to do on the face of a Christian woman? Of which the one feigns the redness of cheeks and lips, the other the whiteness of face and neck: fires for young men, kindlings of lusts, tokens of an unchaste mind. How can she weep for her sins who lays bare her skin with tears and draws furrows on her face?
That adornment is not of the Lord; that veil is of Antichrist. With what confidence does she lift up to heaven a face which her Maker would not recognize? In vain is youth pretended and the age of girlhood alleged; a widow who has ceased to please her husband and, according to the apostle, is truly a widow, has need of nothing but perseverance. She remembers her former pleasure, she knows what she has lost, in what she has taken delight: the burning darts of the devil must be quenched by the cold of fastings and vigils. Either we must speak as we are clothed, or be clothed as we speak. Why do we promise one thing and display another? The tongue rings out chastity and the whole body proclaims unchastity. So much as concerns dress and adornment.
For the rest, a widow who lives in pleasures — this is not mine, but the apostle's — though living, is dead. What does he mean by saying 'though living, is dead'? To the ignorant she seems indeed to live and not to be dead to sin, but to Christ, whom secret things do not deceive, she is dead. For the soul that has sinned, that same shall die. Of certain men the sins are manifest, going before them to judgment, but certain men they also follow after. Likewise good deeds also are manifest, and those that are otherwise cannot be hidden. What he says is of this sort: some sin so freely and openly that, after you have seen them, you at once understand them to be sinners; but others, who cunningly conceal their vices, we recognize from their subsequent manner of life.
Likewise good things too in some are in the open, in others we learn by long acquaintance. What need is there, then, for us to boast of a chastity which, without its companions and appendages — continence and thrift — cannot make itself believed? The apostle mortifies his body and subjects it to the rule of the soul, lest, what he enjoins on others, he himself should not keep; and shall a young girl, with her body burning from rich food, be secure about her chastity? Nor indeed, in saying these things, do I condemn the foods which God created to be used with thanksgiving, but I assert that they are incitements of pleasures to young men and maidens. Not the fires of Etna, not the Vulcanian soil, not Vesuvius and Olympus, seethe with such great heats as youthful marrows full of wine and inflamed with feasting.
Avarice is trodden down by very many and laid aside with the moneybag; silence, once enjoined, mends the slanderous tongue; the care of the body and the fashion of clothing is changed in the space of a single hour; all other sins are external and, what is on the outside, is easily cast off: lust alone, implanted by God for the procreation of children, if it has gone beyond its own bounds, overflows into vice and by a certain law of nature strains to burst forth into intercourse. It is therefore of great virtue and of anxious diligence to overcome that which you were born in the flesh, not to live carnally, to fight with oneself daily, and to watch the enclosed enemy — as the fables tell of Argus — with a hundred eyes. This is what the apostle was saying in other words: 'Every sin that a man commits is outside the body;
but he who commits fornication sins against his own body.' Physicians, and those who have written about the natures of human bodies — and especially Galen in the books whose title is 'On Healthful Things' — say that the bodies of boys and youths, and of men and women of full age, seethe with an innate heat, and that foods which increase heat are harmful to these ages, while it conduces to health to take cold things in food and drink; just as, on the contrary, to old men, who labour with phlegm and cold, warm foods and old wines are beneficial. Whence also the Saviour says: 'Take heed to yourselves, lest perchance your hearts be weighed down with surfeiting and drunkenness and the cares of this life.' And the apostle: 'Wine, wherein is riot.'
Nor is it any wonder that the potter felt this about the little vessel which he himself fashioned, when even the comic poet, whose aim it is to know and describe human characters, has said: 'Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus grows cold.' First, therefore — if, however, the firmness of your stomach allows it — until you pass beyond your girlish years, take water for your drink, which by nature is coldest; or, if weakness forbids this, hear with Timothy: 'Use a little wine for your stomach's sake and your frequent infirmities.' Then in the foods themselves avoid all that is heating; I speak not only of meats, concerning which the vessel of election delivers his sentence:
'It is good not to drink wine and not to eat meat'; but even among the very pulses, all that are flatulent and heavy are to be shunned — and know that nothing so conduces for Christian youths as the eating of herbs, whence also in another place he says: 'Let him who is weak eat herbs' — and the heat of bodies is to be tempered by cooler fare. But if the three children and Daniel fed on pulse, they were children, and had not yet come to the frying-pan in which the Babylonian king fried the aged judges. For us it is not the cultivation of bodies — which in them, apart from the privilege of the grace of God, had shone forth from foods of this kind — but the vigour of the soul that is sought, which is made stronger by the weakness of the flesh.
Hence it is that not a few of those who aspire to a chaste life collapse in the middle of the journey, while they think abstinence to consist in flesh alone, and load their stomach with pulse, which, taken moderately and sparingly, is harmless. And, that I may speak what I feel, nothing so inflames the bodies and titillates the genital members as undigested food and belching wrenched up. I would rather, my daughter, that you were imperilled for a little while in modesty than in your cause. Whatever is a seedbed of pleasures, count it poison. A sparing diet and a belly always hungry are to be preferred to three-day fasts, and it is much better to take a little daily than seldom to the full. That rain is best which descends gently into the earth; a sudden and excessive downpour overthrows the fields headlong.
When you eat, remember that immediately afterward you must pray and at once read. Keep a fixed number of verses from the holy Scriptures; render this due to your Lord, and do not grant rest to your limbs until you have filled the basket of your breast with this weft. After the holy Scriptures, read the treatises of learned men — of those, at least, whose faith is well known. You need not seek gold in the mud: with many pearls purchase the one pearl. Stand, as Jeremiah bids, upon the many ways, that you may come to that Way which leads to the Father. Transfer your love of necklaces and gems and silken garments to the knowledge of the Scriptures.
Enter the land of promise, flowing with milk and honey; eat fine flour and oil; be clothed, like Joseph, in a coat of many colours; let your ears be pierced, like Jerusalem, with the word of God, so that from them may hang the precious grains of a new harvest. You have holy Exsuperius, of proven age and faith, to instruct you frequently with his counsels. Make yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, who may receive you into eternal dwellings. Bestow your riches on those who buy not pheasants but common bread, who drive away hunger, not on those who increase luxury. Have understanding of the needy and the poor. Give to everyone who asks you, but above all to those who are of the household of the faith: clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the sick.
As often as you stretch out your hand, think of Christ. Beware lest, while your Lord goes begging, you increase the riches of strangers. Flee the company of young men. Let the roofs of your house not look upon curled, foppish, and wanton youths. Let a singer be driven off as one who brings harm; drive out from your dwellings, as the deadly songs of the Sirens, women lute-players and harpists and every such choir of the devil. Do not go out repeatedly into public and be carried about with the freedom of widows, preceded by an army of eunuchs. It is a most evil habit when the frail sex and a weak age abuse their own discretion and suppose that whatever pleases is permitted. All things indeed are lawful, but not all things are expedient.
Let no curled-haired steward, no comely foster-brother, no fair and ruddy attendant cling to your side: sometimes the character of mistresses is judged from the appearance of their maidservants. Seek the company of holy virgins and widows; and if the necessity of conversing with men presses upon you, do not avoid witnesses, and let there be such confidence in your talking that, if another enters, you neither take fright nor blush. The face is the mirror of the mind, and the silent eyes confess the secrets of the heart. We saw lately how a shameful report flew about through the whole East: the age and adornment and dress and gait, the indiscreet fellowship, the exquisite banquets, the regal display, spoke of the nuptials of Nero and Sardanapalus. Let another's wound be our caution;
when the pestilent man is scourged, the fool will grow wiser. Holy love does not have impatience; a false rumour is quickly quelled, and one's later life passes judgment upon the earlier. It is indeed impossible for anyone to pass through the courses of this life without the bite of men's tongues, and it is the solace of the wicked to carp at the good, while they think the guilt of sinners is lessened by the multitude of those who sin; yet the fire of stubble quickly dies down, and the overflowing flame gradually expires when its fuel fails, if in the past year the report has lied — or, if it certainly told the truth, let the vice cease, and the rumour too will cease. This I say, not because I fear anything sinister concerning you, but because, out of the affection of love, I dread even what is safe.
Oh, if you could see your sister, and if it were granted you to hear that eloquence of her sacred lips in person, you would perceive great spirits in a tiny frame, you would hear the whole furniture of the Old and New Testament seething forth from her heart. She counts fasting as sport, prayer as delight. She holds the timbrel after the example of Miriam and, when Pharaoh is drowned, leads the choir of virgins in song: Let us sing to the Lord, for he is gloriously magnified; the horse and its rider he has cast into the sea. These she teaches to be harpists for Christ, these she trains to be lute-players for the Saviour. So the day is passed, so the night, and with oil made ready for the lamps the coming of the Bridegroom is awaited. Imitate then, you also, your kinswoman: let Rome possess what Bethlehem, narrower than the city of Rome, possesses.
You have wealth; it is easy for you to minister the supports of livelihood to the needy. Let virtue spend what was being prepared for luxury; let no woman who is about to scorn marriage fear poverty. Ransom virgins, whom you may lead into the chamber of the Saviour; take up widows, whom you may mingle among the lilies of virgins and the roses of martyrs like so many violets; in place of the crown of thorns, in which Christ bore the sins of the world, weave such garlands. Let your father, that most noble man, rejoice and help; let him learn from his daughter what he had learned from his wife. Already his head has grown grey, his knees tremble, his teeth fall out and wrinkles plough his aged brow; death is near at the doors, the pyre is marked out close by: willing or unwilling, we are old men. Let him prepare for himself the provision that is needful for a long journey.
Let him carry with him what he must unwillingly leave behind — nay rather, let him send on ahead into heaven what, if he does not take heed, the earth will take. Young widows are wont, some of whom have turned back after Satan, when they have grown wanton against Christ, to say, waxing lustful: 'My little patrimony daily perishes, the inheritance of my forebears is squandered, a slave has spoken insolently, a maidservant has ignored my command. Who will go out into public? Who will answer for the tributes of the fields? Who will educate my little ones? Who will bring up the home-born slaves?' And this — oh, the wickedness! — they set forward as a reason for marriage, which alone ought to have been an impediment to nuptials. A mother brings in upon her sons not a stepfather but an enemy, not a parent but a tyrant.
Inflamed with lust, she forgets her own womb, and lately a new bride, mourning among her little ones who know nothing of her miseries, she is bedded. Why do you allege your patrimony, why the arrogance of your slaves? Confess your shamefulness. No woman marries a husband for this end, that she may not sleep with a husband. But if lust does not truly goad you, what madness so great is it to prostitute your chastity in the manner of harlots, so that riches may be increased, and for a cheap and perishable thing your modesty — which is both precious and eternal — be polluted? If you have children, why do you seek marriage? If you have none, why do you not fear the barrenness you have already proved, and prefer an uncertain thing to a sure honour? Marriage contracts are now written out for you, so that after a little while you may be compelled to make a will.
The husband's illness will be feigned; and what he wishes you, who are to die, to do, he himself, who is to survive, will do. Or if it should happen that you have children by a second husband too, there is domestic strife, civil war within the house. It will not be permitted you to love your children, nor to look with equal eyes upon those you have borne. Secretly you will offer them food; he will envy the dead, and unless you hate your sons you will still seem to love their father. But if he has offspring by a former wife and has brought you into his house, even though you be most merciful, all the comedies and mime-writers and the common commonplaces of the rhetoricians will declaim against the most savage stepmother. If a stepson languishes and his head aches, you will be defamed as a poisoner. If you do not give him food, you are called cruel; if you do, you are called a sorceress.
I beseech you, what so great good do second marriages have, that they can compensate for these evils? Do we wish to know what widows ought to be like? Let us read the Gospel according to Luke: 'And there was,' it says, 'Anna a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser.' Anna is interpreted 'grace'; Phanuel in our tongue resounds as 'the face of God'; Aser is rendered either as 'blessedness' or as 'riches.' Because, then, from her youth until eighty-four years she had borne the burden of widowhood and did not depart from the temple of God, persisting day and night in fastings and supplications, she therefore merited spiritual grace and is named the daughter of the face of God, and is reckoned by her ancestry in blessedness and riches.
Let us recall the widow of Zarephath, who preferred the hunger of Elijah both to her own safety and to that of her sons, and who, being herself to die that very night with her son, left the guest a survivor, choosing rather to lose her life than her almsgiving; and in a handful of meal she prepared for herself the seed of the Lord's harvest. The flour is sown, and a cruse of oil is born. In Judaea there was a scarcity of grain — for the grain of wheat had there died — and among the Gentiles the streams of the widow's oil flowed forth. We read of Judith — if indeed anyone is pleased to receive the volume — a widow worn out with fastings and squalid in mourning attire, who did not mourn her dead husband, but by the squalor of her body sought the coming of her Bridegroom.
I see the hand armed with a sword, the right hand bloodied; I recognize the head of Holofernes brought back from the midst of the enemy. A woman conquers men, and chastity cuts off lust; and with her attire suddenly changed she returns to her victorious squalor, cleaner than all the adornments of the world. Certain persons, unskilfully, even number Deborah among the widows and suppose the leader Barak to be Deborah's son, though Scripture records otherwise. She will be named by us for this reason, that she was a prophetess and is reckoned in the order of the judges. And because she could say, 'How sweet are your words to my throat, sweeter than honey and the honeycomb to my mouth,' she received the name 'bee,' being fed on the flowers of the Scriptures, suffused with the fragrance of the Holy Spirit, and composing the sweet juices of ambrosia with her prophetic mouth.
Naomi, which in our tongue means 'she who is called near' — παρακεκλημένη — which we may interpret as 'the consoled,' when her husband and children had died abroad, brought back her chastity into her homeland, and, sustained by this provision, kept her Moabite daughter-in-law, so that the prophecy of Isaiah might be fulfilled: 'Send forth the lamb, O Lord, the ruler of the earth, from the rock of the desert.' I come to the widow of the Gospel, the poor little widow, richer than all the people of Israel, who, receiving a grain of mustard seed and putting leaven into three measures of flour, tempered by the grace of the Holy Spirit the confession of the Father and the Son, and cast two mites into the treasury — whatever she was able to have in her substance — and offered up all her riches in both testaments of her faith.
These are the two seraphim glorifying the Trinity with their thrice-holy cry and stored up in the treasury of the Church, whence too the burning coal, grasped with the tongs of both Testaments, purges the lips of the sinner. Why should I go back to ancient things and bring forth the virtues of women from books, when you can set before your eyes many women in the very city where you live, whose example you ought to imitate? And lest I seem to run through each one out of flattery, holy Marcella suffices for you, who, answering after her kind, related to us something from the Gospel. Anna had lived seven years from her virginity with a husband, this woman seven months; the former awaited the coming of Christ, this one holds him whom the former received; the former sang of him as he wailed in the cradle, this one proclaims him triumphant;
the former spoke of him to all who awaited the redemption of Jerusalem, this one cries out together with the redeemed nations: 'A brother does not redeem; shall a man redeem?' and from another psalm: 'A man was born in her, and the Most High himself founded her.' I know that about three years ago I published books against Jovinian, in which I ground down, by the authority of the Scriptures, the objections that came against me from the contrary side, where the Apostle grants second marriages. And there is no need to write the same things afresh, since you can borrow from there what has been written. This alone — lest I exceed the measure of a letter — I wish you to be admonished of: think that you are daily about to die, and you will never think of a second marriage. LETTER 55. TO AMANDUS THE PRESBYTER.
A brief letter cannot explain long questions and, compressing much into a narrow space, cannot bind up in words what has been expanded in meanings. You ask what that saying in the Gospel according to Matthew means: 'Be not anxious for the morrow; sufficient for the day is its own evil.' 'The morrow' in the holy Scriptures signifies future time, as Jacob speaks in Genesis: 'My righteousness shall hear me tomorrow'; and where an altar is built by the two tribes Reuben and Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh, and an embassy is sent to them by all Israel, when they answer Phinehas the priest that they had made the altar for this reason, lest tomorrow the possession of worshipping God be denied to their sons. And you will find many things of this kind in the Old Testament.
He, then, who forbade us to think about future things, granted us to think about present ones, on account of the frailty of human life. But as for what he says, 'Sufficient for the day is its own evil,' understand it in this way: it is enough for us to think about the present straits of this world; what need is there to extend the mind to uncertain and future things, which either we cannot attain or perhaps quickly lose once found? For κακία, which the Latin has rendered as 'malice,' means two things among the Greeks — both malice and affliction, which the Greeks call κάκωσις — and here it ought rather to have been translated as 'affliction.'
But if anyone is led contentiously, unwilling that κακία should sound as 'affliction' and 'straits,' but rather as 'malice,' then it must be explained in that sense in which the world is set 'in the evil one,' that is, in evil — and in the Lord's Prayer we say, 'Deliver us from evil' — and that it may be enough for us to have the present contest against the malice of this world. In the second place you have set the passage from the blessed Apostle Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, in which he speaks: 'Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who fornicates sins against his own body.' Let us therefore read a little above and so come to these words, lest we should wish to know the whole meaning from the extreme parts and, so to speak, the tail of the chapter.
'The body,' he says, 'is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God, who raised up the Lord, has also raised us up with him by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? God forbid. Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body? For the two, it says, shall be one flesh. But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit. Flee fornication. Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who fornicates sins against his own body,' and the rest. The holy Apostle, disputing against luxury and saying in the preceding words, 'Meats for the belly and the belly for meats; but God will destroy both this and these,' comes consequently to fornication.