For indeed luxury is the mother of lust, and the pleasure of the genitals follows a belly distended with food and irrigated with draughts of wine; and, so to speak, according to the order of the members the order of the vices must be arranged. Every sin, therefore — for example theft, murder, robbery, perjury, and the rest that are like these — has repentance after the deed and, though gain entices, yet conscience gnaws; pleasure alone and lust, even at the very time of repenting, suffer the goads of the past and the titillation of the flesh and the incentives of sin, so that through these things, which we desire to correct while thinking on them, there is again matter for sinning. Otherwise: the other sins are external — for whatever we do, we do against others —;
fornication defiles not only the conscience of the fornicator but the very body; and, according to the Lord's saying, in which he says, 'For this cause a man shall leave father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh,' he too becomes one body with the harlot and sins against his own body, while he makes the temple of Christ to be the body of a harlot. Let us also speak otherwise, lest we should seem to pass over any opinion of the Greeks: it is one thing to sin through the body, another to sin in the body. Theft, murder, and the other sins apart from fornication we administer outwardly by the hands; fornication alone is exercised by us within our body, not through the body against others, and the preposition 'through' implies an instrument, but 'in' implies a passion in itself.
There are also those who discourse thus, that according to holy Scripture the wife is the body of the husband, and whoever has fornicated sins against his own body, that is, against his wife, while by his fornication he defiles her and makes even her, who does not sin, to sin by her union with him. (5). The third, that is, the last, proposition was concerning the same epistle of the Apostle, where, disputing about the resurrection, he comes to that place where it is written: 'For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. But when he has said that all things are subjected to him, it is beyond doubt that this is except him who subjected all things to him.'
'But when all things shall have been subjected to him, then the Son himself also shall be subjected to him who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all.' And I wonder that you wished to ask this of me, since holy Hilary, bishop of Poitiers, filled up the eleventh book against the Arians with this question and its solution. Yet let us at least say a few things. The whole stumbling-block in this is, why the Son is said to be subject to the Father. What is more base or inferior: to be subject to the Father — which is often a mark of piety, and it is written in the psalm, 'Shall not my soul be subject to God?' — or to be crucified and to be made the curse of the cross? For 'cursed is everyone who hangs upon a tree.'
He, then, who was made a curse for us, that he might free us from the curse, do you wonder if he was made subject for us, that he might make us subject to the Father, saying in the Gospel: 'No one goes to the Father except through me,' and 'When I am lifted up, I will draw all things to myself'? Christ is subject to the Father in those who are faithful, because all believers — nay rather, the whole human race — are reckoned members of his own body. But in those who are unbelieving, that is, in Jews, pagans, heretics, he is said to be unsubjected, because that part of his members is not subject to the faith.
But at the end of the world, when all the members shall have seen Christ reigning — that is, his own body — they too shall be subjected to Christ, that is, to their own body, so that the whole body of Christ may be subjected to God and the Father, and God may be all in all. He does not say, 'that the Father may be all in all,' but 'that God' — which is the proper name of the Trinity and can be referred as much to the Father as to the Son and the Holy Spirit — so that humanity may be subjected to divinity. By 'humanity' in this place we do not mean gentleness and clemency, which the Greeks call φιλανθρωπία, but the whole human race. Furthermore, as to what he says, 'that God may be all in all,' this is to be understood in this sense:
The Lord and Saviour now is not all in all, but a part in each — for example, in Solomon wisdom, in David goodness, in Job patience, in Daniel the knowledge of things to come, in Peter faith, in Phinehas and Paul zeal, in John virginity, and the rest in the rest — but when the end of all things shall have come, then he will be all in all, so that each of the saints may have all the virtues and Christ may be whole in all. (3). I found joined to your letter and little commentary a brief note, in which these things were contained:
'It is to be asked of him — that is, of me — whether a woman who has left an adulterous and sodomite husband and has taken another by force may, without penance, communicate with the Church while he whom she had first left is still living.' Reading this, I recalled that little verse: 'to make excuses for excuses in sins.' For all men favour our own vices and, what we do by our own will, we ascribe to the necessity of nature. Just as if a young man should say: 'I suffer the violence of my body, ardour drives me to lust, the very organs of my genital members and the composition of my body seek feminine embraces'; and again a murderer says: 'I was in want,' he says, 'I lacked food, I had no covering for my body;
therefore I shed another's blood, lest I myself should die of hunger and cold.' Answer therefore the sister who inquires of us about her state, not with our own but with the apostolic opinion: 'Or do you not know, brethren — I speak to those who know the law — that the law has dominion over a man as long as he lives? For the woman who is under a husband is bound by the law while her husband lives. But if her husband dies, she is freed from the law of the husband. Therefore, while her husband lives, she shall be called an adulteress if she takes another man'; and in another place: 'A woman is bound as long as her husband lives. But if her husband sleeps, she is freed: let her marry whom she wills, only in the Lord.'
The Apostle, therefore, cutting off all pretexts, has most plainly defined that a woman is an adulteress, while her husband lives, if she marries another. Do not bring forward to me an abductor and violence, a mother's persuasion, a father's authority, throngs of kinsmen, the plots and contempt of slaves, losses to the family estate: as long as the husband lives, though he be an adulterer, though a sodomite, though covered with all crimes and forsaken by his wife on account of these wickednesses, he is reckoned her husband, and it is not lawful for her to take another man. Nor does the Apostle decree this by his own authority, but, with Christ speaking in him, the words of Christ, who says in the Gospel: 'Whoever puts away his wife, except for the cause of fornication, makes her commit adultery;
and whoever marries her who is put away is an adulterer.' Take note of what he says: 'Whoever marries her who is put away is an adulterer'; whether she herself has put away her husband or has been put away by her husband, he who marries her is an adulterer. Whence too the apostles, understanding the heavy burden of wedlock, say: 'If it is so, it is not expedient for a man to take a wife.' To whom the Lord says: 'He who can receive it, let him receive it,' and at once, under the example of three eunuchs, he brings in the blessedness of virginity, which is held back by no law of the flesh. (4). Nor could I sufficiently notice what it might be that he wished to say: 'another man taken by force.' What is this: 'taken by force'? Namely, having gathered a multitude, he seized her unwilling: and why did she, the ravished one, not afterwards dismiss the ravisher?
Let her read the books of Moses, and she will find that a woman betrothed to a man, if she was overpowered in the city and did not cry out, is punished as an adulteress; but if in the field, she is innocent of the crime. Therefore this sister, who, as she says, suffered violence so as to be joined to another, if she wishes to receive the body of Christ and not to be thought an adulteress, let her do penance, provided at least that from the time of her penance she is not coupled with the second man — who is called not a husband but an adulterer. But if this seems hard to her and she cannot forsake him nor prefer the Lord to pleasure, let her hear the Apostle crying out: 'You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons,' and in another place:
'What communion has light with darkness? What agreement has Christ with Belial?' I will say a new thing — nay rather, not new but old, which is confirmed by the authority of the Old Testament. If she leaves the second husband and wishes to be reconciled to the first, she cannot. For it is written in Deuteronomy: 'If a man takes a wife and has her, and she does not find favour in his sight because of some foulness, he shall write a bill of divorce and give it into her hand and send her away from his house.'
'And when she has departed and married another husband, and he too hates her and gives her a bill of divorce and sends her away from his house, or indeed dies, the first husband cannot receive her again as wife, because she has been defiled and made abominable before the Lord; lest you cause your land to sin, which the Lord your God has given you to possess.' Wherefore I beseech you to console her — nay rather, to provoke her to salvation. Rotting flesh needs the knife and the cautery; nor is the fault with the medicine, but with the wound, when the physician with merciful cruelty does not spare, that he may spare; he rages, that he may show mercy. LETTER 56. (LETTER OF AUGUSTINE TO JEROME).
To the most beloved lord, and to be revered and embraced with the most sincere devotion of charity, the brother and fellow-presbyter Jerome, from Augustine. Never has anyone become so known to another by his face as to me the quiet gladness of your studies in the Lord, and your truly liberal exercise. Although, therefore, I greatly desire to know you altogether, yet I lack some little thing of you, namely the presence of your body. Even this, moreover — after the brother Alypius, now a most blessed bishop, but then already worthy of the episcopate, saw you and, returning, was seen by me — I cannot deny has been in great part impressed upon me by his report; and even before his return, when he there was seeing you, I was seeing you, but with his eyes.
For whoever knew us would say that in mind he and I are not two but one, and in body two only — with concord, that is, and most faithful familiarity, not in merits, in which he excels. Since, therefore, you already love me first through the communion of the spirit, by which we strive toward unity, and then from his mouth, I in no way impudently, as though some unknown person, commend to your brotherhood the brother Profuturus, who we hope will truly be 'profitable' to our endeavours and then by your help — unless perhaps he is such that through him I myself may be made more commended to you than he through me. Thus far, perhaps, I ought to have written, if I wished to be content with the customary manner of formal letters;
but my mind teems to communicate with you speeches about our studies, which we have in Christ Jesus our Lord, who deigns to minister to us, not moderately, many benefits and, as it were, certain provisions for the journey shown to us by himself — even through your charity. We ask, therefore, and with us asks all the zealous fellowship of the African churches, that you not be reluctant to bestow care and labour on translating the books of those who have treated our Scriptures in Greek in the best possible way. For you can bring it about that we too may have such men, and one especially, whom you name more willingly in your letters.
But as for translating the holy canonical writings into the Latin tongue, I would not have you labour, except in the manner in which you translated Job, namely with signs applied, so that it may appear what difference there is between this your translation and that of the Seventy, whose authority is most weighty. But I cannot sufficiently wonder if anything is still found in the Hebrew copies that has escaped so many most skilled interpreters of that language. For I pass over the Seventy, concerning whose greater harmony either of counsel or of spirit — than if it were one man — I do not dare to pronounce any settled opinion in any direction, except that I think a preeminent authority ought without controversy to be assigned to them in this office:
Those move me more who, since they interpreted later and, as is reported, held the way and rules of Hebrew words and expressions more tenaciously, not only did not agree among themselves, but even left many things which were to be dug out and brought forth so long afterward. For if they are obscure, you too are believed able to be deceived in them; if they are manifest, those men are not believed to have been able to be deceived in them. Of this matter, therefore, according to your charity, having set forth the reasons, I would beseech you to make me certain. I have also read certain writings said to be yours upon the epistles of the Apostle Paul; and when you wished to unravel the one to the Galatians, there came into your hands that passage where the apostle Peter is recalled from a pernicious pretence.
That a patronage of lying was there undertaken, whether by you, so great a man, or by anyone else, if another wrote those things, I confess I grieve not moderately, until those things which move me be refuted — if perchance they can be refuted. For to me it seems most destructive to believe that there is any lie in the holy books, that is, that those men through whom that Scripture was ministered and written down for us lied in anything in their books. For it is one question whether it is ever right for a good man to lie, and another question whether it behoved a writer of the holy Scriptures to lie; nay rather, not another, but no question at all.
For once some officious lie has been admitted into so lofty a pinnacle of authority, there will remain no portion of those books which — as it may seem to anyone either too hard in morals or incredible to faith — will not be referred, by that same most pernicious rule, to the intention and dutiful purpose of a lying author. For if the apostle Paul was lying when, rebuking the apostle Peter, he said: 'If you, being a Jew, live in the manner of the Gentiles and not as the Jews do, how do you compel the Gentiles to Judaize?'
and if Peter seemed to him to have acted rightly, whom he both said and wrote had not acted rightly, in order as it were to soothe the minds of those who were in an uproar — what shall we answer, when perverse men arise forbidding marriage (whose coming he himself foretold), and when they say that all that the same apostle spoke concerning the establishing of the law of matrimony was uttered as a lie for the sake of men who might be stirred up by love of their spouses — not, that is, because he thought thus, but that their hostility might be appeased? There is no need to recall many instances. For even things concerning the praises of God may seem to be officious lies, so that among rather sluggish men love of Him may burn the warmer; and thus nowhere in the sacred books will there be any sure authority of chaste truth.
Do we not observe that this same apostle, with immense care to commend the truth, says: 'But if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain, and your faith also is vain. Yea, and we are found even false witnesses of God, because we have testified against God that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up.' If someone should say to him: 'Why do you shudder at this lie, since you have said a thing which, even if it be false, pertains most of all to the praise of God?' — would he not, detesting the man's madness, with whatever words and expressions he could, open into the light the inner chambers of his heart, crying out that it is no lesser crime — or perhaps even a greater one — for falsehood to be praised in God than for truth to be reproached?
It must therefore be brought about that such a man draw near to the knowledge of the divine Scriptures, one who thinks so holily and so truthfully of the sacred books that he is unwilling to take delight in any part of them through officious lies, and who rather passes over what he does not understand than prefers his own heart to that truth. For assuredly, when he says this, he demands to be believed himself, and yet contrives that we should not believe the authority of the divine Scriptures. And I indeed, with whatever strength the Lord supplies, would show that all those testimonies which have been adduced to establish the usefulness of lying ought to be understood otherwise, so that everywhere their firm truth might be taught. For as testimonies ought not to be lies, so they ought not to favor a lie.
But this I leave to your discernment. For when more diligent consideration is applied to the reading, you will perhaps see it much more easily than I. And to this consideration your piety will compel you, whereby you recognize that the authority of the divine Scriptures wavers, so that in them each man believes what he wishes and disbelieves what he does not wish, if once it has been accepted that those men, through whom these things were ministered to us, could in their writings have lied in an officious manner — unless perhaps you are going to give us certain rules by which we may know where one ought to lie and where one ought not. But if that can be done, by no means, I beg, explain it by lying and doubtful reasonings; nor judge me burdensome or shameless, by the most truthful humanity of our Lord.
For — not to say by no fault at all — certainly by no great fault does my error favor the truth, if truth can rightly favor a lie in you. I would desire to speak of many other things with your most sincere heart, and to confer about our Christian pursuit, but no single letter suffices for this longing of mine. I can do it more fully through the brother, whom I rejoice to have sent to be mingled with and nourished by your sweet and profitable conversations. And yet, as much as I could wish, perhaps not even he himself — I say it with his leave — grasps it, although I would in no way prefer myself to him.
For I confess myself the more capacious to receive of you, but I see that he is becoming the fuller, wherein without doubt he surpasses me; and after he returns — which I hope, with the Lord's help, will prosper — when I have shared in his heart heaped full by you, he will not be able to fill up what in me will still be empty and greedy for your thoughts. Thus it will come about that even then I shall be the more needy, and he the more abundant. Indeed the same brother carries some of our writings with him; if you deign to read them, I beg that you also apply a sincere and brotherly severity. For not otherwise do I understand what is written: 'The just man shall correct me in mercy, and shall reprove me;'
'but let not the oil of the sinner fatten my head' — except in this, that the rebuker who heals is loved more than the flatterer who anoints the head. But as for me, most difficultly do I read as a good judge what I myself have written; I read it either too timid to be right, or too fond of it. I do sometimes even see my own faults, but these I prefer to hear from better men, lest, when I have perhaps rightly rebuked myself, I again flatter myself and seem to have passed upon myself a sentence timorous rather than just. 57. TO PAMMACHIUS, ON THE BEST METHOD OF TRANSLATING. The apostle Paul, about to answer touching the charges in the presence of King Agrippa — in such a way as he who was to hear could understand — secure of victory in his cause, at once at the outset congratulates himself, saying:
'Concerning all the things whereof I am accused by the Jews, O King Agrippa, I count myself blessed, since I am to make my defense before you this day, who especially know all the customs and questions that are among the Jews.' For he had read that saying of Isaiah: 'Blessed is he who speaks into the ears of one that hears,' and he knew that an orator's words profit only so far as the judge's prudence has understood. Whence I too count myself blessed, in this business at least, that before learned ears I am to answer an unlearned tongue, which lays to my charge either ignorance or falsehood — if either I knew not how to translate another's writings truly, or would not: of which the one is an error, the other a crime.
And lest perhaps my accuser, with that ease wherewith he says everything, and that impunity whereby he thinks all things permitted to himself, should arraign me too before you — as he laid charges against Pope Epiphanius — I have sent this letter, which may teach you, and through you others who deign to love us, the order of the affair. About two years before this, the aforesaid Pope Epiphanius had sent to Bishop John a letter reproving him in certain doctrines and afterward mildly calling him to repentance. Copies of it were being eagerly snatched up throughout Palestine, whether on account of the author's merit or the elegance of the composition.
There was in our little monastery a man not undistinguished among his own people, Eusebius of Cremona, who — since this letter was flitting about upon the lips of many, and both learned and unlearned admired it for its doctrine and the purity of its speech — began earnestly to ask me to turn it for him into Latin and, for the sake of easier understanding, to explain it more plainly; for he was utterly ignorant of Greek eloquence. I did what he wished. Summoning a scribe, hastily and swiftly I dictated it, briefly noting in the margin upon the page what inner sense each several chapter contained — since he had exceedingly begged that I do this for him alone — and I asked of him in turn that he keep the copy at home and not readily give it out to the crowd.
So the matter passed on for a year and six months, until the aforesaid translation migrated from his book-chests to Jerusalem by some new sleight of hand. For a certain false monk — either having received money, as is plainly given to understand, or from gratuitous malice, as the corrupter vainly strives to persuade us — after pilfering that man's papers and funds, was made a Judas, a betrayer, and gave my adversaries occasion to bark against me, so that among the unskilled they proclaim me a forger: that I did not render word for word, that for 'honorable' I said 'most dear,' and that by a malicious rendering — which is a sacrilege to say — I refused to translate αἰδεσιμώτατον (most reverend). These, and trifles of this sort, are my crimes.
And first, before I answer concerning the translation, I wish to ask those who call malice prudence: whence have you a copy of the letter? Who gave it? With what face do you bring forward what you purchased by a crime? What will be safe among men, if we cannot conceal our secrets even behind walls and in book-chests? If I were pressing this charge against you before the tribunals of judges, I would subject the guilty to the laws, which, even for the benefit of the treasury, appoint a penalty for informers, and which, though they accept the betrayal, yet condemn the betrayer. The gain, forsooth, is pleasing; the intent is displeasing.
Not long ago the emperor Theodosius condemned to death Hesychius, a man of consular rank, against whom the patriarch Gamaliel had waged the gravest enmities, because, having suborned his scribe, he had seized that man's papers. We read in the ancient histories that a schoolmaster who had betrayed the children of the Faliscans was handed over bound to the boys and sent back to those whom he was betraying, and that the Roman people would not accept a wicked victory. When Pyrrhus, king of the Epirotes, was being tended in his camp for a wound, Fabricius judged it a sacrilege that he should be killed by the treachery of his own physician; nay rather, he sent the man back bound to his master, so as not to countenance a crime even in an enemy.
What the public laws protect, what enemies protect, what is held sacred amid wars and swords — this, among us, among monks and priests of Christ, was left unsafe. And one of them dares, with raised eyebrow and snapping fingers, to belch forth and say: 'Why, what of it, if he bought it, if he suborned? He did what profited him.' A marvelous defense of a crime! As though robbers and thieves and pirates too did not do what profits them. Certainly Annas and Caiaphas, when they seduced the unhappy Judas, did what they reckoned useful to themselves. I wish to write in my papers whatever trifles I please, to comment on the Scriptures, to bite back at those who wound me, to vent my spleen, to exercise myself in commonplaces, and, as it were, to store up polished arrows for the fight:
so long as I do not bring forth my thoughts, even curses are not crimes — nay, they are not even curses, which the public ear knows not. You corrupt little slaves, you suborn clients, and — as we read in the fables — with gold you penetrate to Danaë, and, having dissembled what you have done, you call me a forger, when by accusing you confess in yourself a far worse crime than that whereof you charge me? One accuses you of being a heretic, another of perverse doctrines: you keep silence; you dare not answer them yourself; you tear the translator to pieces, you cavil about syllables, and you deem your whole defense to lie in disparaging one who holds his peace. Suppose that in translating I either erred or omitted somewhat — here the whole hinge of your affair turns, this is your defense —:
are you then not a heretic, if I be a bad translator? Nor do I say this because I know you to be a heretic — let him know it who accused you, let him know it who wrote — but because it is most foolish for one accused by another to bring charges against yet a third, and, with his own body pierced through on every side, to seek solace from a sleeping man's wound. Thus far I have spoken as if I had altered something of the letter, and as if a plain translation could contain an error, not a crime. But now, since the letter itself shows that nothing has been changed in the sense, nor things added, nor any doctrine fabricated, 'they bring it about, by understanding, that they understand nothing,' and while they wish to expose another's unskillfulness, they betray their own.
For I not only confess, but with free voice profess, that in translating the Greeks — except in the holy Scriptures, where even the order of the words is a mystery — I express not word from word, but sense from sense. And I have as master in this matter Tully (Cicero), who translated Plato's Protagoras and Xenophon's Oeconomicus and the two most beautiful orations of Aeschines and Demosthenes against each other. How much he passed over in them, how much he added, how much he altered, in order to explain the peculiarities of the other tongue by the peculiarities of his own, is not for the present to say. The very authority of the translator suffices for me, who spoke thus in the prologue of those same orations:
'I thought I ought to undertake a labor useful to students, though for myself indeed not necessary. For I translated from the Attic writers the most noble orations of the two most eloquent men, opposed to one another — of Aeschines and Demosthenes — and I translated them not as an interpreter, but as an orator, with the same thoughts and their forms, or figures as it were, and with words fitted to our usage. In these I did not think it needful to render word for word, but I preserved the whole kind and force of the words. For I judged that I ought not to count them out to the reader, but as it were to weigh them out.' And again at the close of his discourse: 'If, as I hope, I shall have so expressed their orations, using all their virtues — that is, the thoughts and their figures and the order of matters,