I pass over the Maximi, the Catos, the Galli, the Pisos, the Bruti, the Scaevolae, the Metelli, the Scauri, the Marii, the Crassi, the Marcelli, and the Aufidii, whose valour in mourning was no less than in war, and whose bereavements Tully unfolded in his book On Consolation — lest I should seem to have sought what is another's rather than our own; although even these things may be said briefly to our reproach, if faith does not furnish what unbelief displayed. Let us come then to our own. I will not, like Jacob and David, bewail sons dying under the Law, but with Christ in the Gospel I will receive them rising again. The mourning of the Jews is the joy of Christians. Weeping shall linger until evening, and joy shall come in the morning. The night is past, and the day is at hand.
Whence Moses too, when dying, is lamented, but Jesus is buried on the mountain without funeral rites and without tears. Whatever can be said from the Scriptures concerning mourning, we have set forth briefly in that book in which we consoled Paula at Rome. Now we must come to the same place by another path, lest we should seem to be treading upon footsteps already past and long worn out. We know indeed that our Nepotianus is with Christ and mingled with the choir of the saints; and what here among us he searched out from afar upon earth and sought after by conjecture, there, beholding it close at hand, he says: 'As we have heard, so also have we seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God.' Yet we cannot bear the longing of his absence, grieving not for his lot, but for our own.
The happier he is, the more are we plunged into grief, because we are deprived of so great a good. The sisters too wept for Lazarus, whom they knew would rise again; and, to express the true affections of a man, the Saviour Himself wept over the one He was about to raise. His apostle too, who had said, 'I desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ,' and elsewhere, 'For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,' gives thanks that Epaphras was restored to him from the nearness of death, lest he should have 'sorrow upon sorrow' — not from fear of unbelief, but from the longing of love. How much more do you — both uncle and bishop, that is, a father both in flesh and in spirit — yearn after your own vitals, and sigh as though they were torn away from you! But I beseech you to set a measure to your grief, mindful of that saying:
'Let nothing be in excess.' And, your wound being for a little while bound up, hear the praises of him in whose virtue you always rejoiced; and do not grieve that you have lost such a one, but rejoice that you have had such a one. And just as those who paint the positions of lands on a small tablet, so in this little volume may you behold the signs of his virtues sketched, not fully expressed; and receive from us not our full powers, but our goodwill. It is a precept of the rhetoricians that the ancestors of him who is to be praised, and their deeds, should be traced back from higher up, and so the discourse should arrive at the man himself by degrees, that he may be made the more illustrious by the virtues of grandsires and fathers, and may seem either not to have degenerated from good men, or himself to have adorned mediocre ones.
But I shall not seek the good things of the flesh, which he himself always despised, amid the praises of the soul; nor shall I boast of lineage — that is, of goods belonging to others — since both Abraham and Isaac, holy men, begot Ishmael and Esau, sinners, and, on the other hand, Jephthah, numbered in the catalogue of the just by the apostle's voice, was born of a harlot. 'The soul,' it says, 'that sinneth, the same shall die'; therefore also the soul that hath not sinned, the same shall live. Neither the virtues nor the vices of parents are imputed to their children; we are reckoned from the time when we are reborn in Christ. Paul, the persecutor of the Church and in the morning a ravening wolf of Benjamin, in the evening gave food to Ananias, bowing his head beneath him.
Therefore let our Nepotianus too, like a little wailing infant and an unschooled boy, be suddenly born to us out of the Jordan. Another perhaps would write that for the sake of his salvation you left the East and the desert, and beguiled me, your most beloved companion, with the hope of your return — that first, if it could be done, you might preserve your widowed sister with her little one, and then, if she should reject that counsel, you might at least preserve your most sweet nephew. For this is that boy of whom I once prophesied to you: 'Though a little grandson hang upon your neck.'
Another, I say, would relate how, in the service of the palace, beneath the military cloak and the gleaming white linen, his body was worn with a hair shirt; how, standing before the powers of the age, he bore a face grown sallow with fastings; how, still under another's garments, he served yet another Master, and had his sword-belt for this end — that he might succour widows, orphans, the oppressed, and the wretched. But these delays of an imperfect service of God do not please me, and Cornelius the centurion, whom I read to have been righteous, I hear was straightway baptized. Nevertheless, let us approve, as it were, certain cradle-beginnings of his nascent faith, so that he who was a devoted soldier under another's standards may be crowned with the laurel, after he has begun to serve under his own King. His belt laid aside and his garb changed, whatever was of his military savings he distributed among the poor.
For he had read: 'He who wishes to be perfect, let him sell all that he has, and give to the poor, and follow me'; and again: 'You cannot serve two masters, God and mammon.' Except for a cheap tunic and a covering to match, which should only keep out the cold from the covered body, he reserved nothing more for himself. His very dress, following the custom of the province, was remarkable neither for elegance nor for squalor. And though he burned daily either to go to the monasteries of Egypt, or to visit the choirs of Mesopotamia, or at least to occupy the solitudes of the islands of Dalmatia, which are parted from Altinum only by a strait, he dared not forsake his uncle the bishop, seeing in him the models of all the virtues and having at home whence he might learn.
In one and the same man he both imitated the monk and venerated the bishop. Not, as often happens with most people, had constant familiarity bred contempt of him; but he so revered him as a parent, so admired him as though he beheld one new every day. Why say more? He becomes a cleric, and through the usual grades is ordained a presbyter. Good Jesus, what groaning, what wailing, what refusal of food, what flight from all men's eyes! Then for the first time and the only time he was angry with his uncle. He complained that he could not bear it, and pleaded that his youthful age was unsuited to the priesthood. But the more he resisted, the more he roused all men's zeal toward himself, and by refusing earned that which he was unwilling to be; and he was the more worthy for this, that he cried out that he was unworthy.
We have seen a Timothy of our own times, with grey hairs in wisdom, and chosen a presbyter by a Moses who himself knew him to be a presbyter. Therefore, understanding the clerical office not as an honour but as a burden, he made it his first care to overcome envy by humility; next, that he might give no story of foul rumour against himself, so that those who carped at his youth might be astonished at his self-restraint. To succour the poor, to visit the sick, to draw men in with hospitality, to soothe with kind words, to rejoice with them that rejoice, to weep with them that weep: he was a staff to the blind, food to the hungry, hope of the wretched, comfort of the mourning. So did he excel in each single virtue, as though he had not the rest. Among the presbyters and his equals he was first in labour, last in rank.
Whatever good he had done, he referred to his uncle; if by chance anything had turned out otherwise than he had expected, he would say that his uncle knew nothing of it and that he himself had erred. In public he acknowledged the bishop, at home the father. He tempered his gravity of manner with a cheerful countenance. His joy you would recognize by a smile, not by loud laughter. He honoured widows and virgins of Christ as mothers, exhorted them as sisters, with all chastity. Now indeed, after he had betaken himself home and, leaving the cleric outside the door, had given himself over to the austerity of the monks, he was frequent in prayers, watchful in beseeching, offering his tears to God, not to men; he moderated his fastings after the manner of a charioteer, according to his weariness and the strength of his body.
He was present at his uncle's table, and so tasted each dish set before him, that he both avoided superstition and preserved his self-restraint. His conversation and every banquet was to bring forward something from the Scriptures, to listen gladly, to answer modestly, to accept what was right, to refute what was wrong without harshness, to instruct rather than to conquer the one disputing against him, and, with a native modesty which adorned his youth, to confess plainly whose each saying was; and in this manner, by declining the glory of learning, he was accounted most learned of all. 'That,' he would say, 'is Tertullian's; this is Cyprian's; this is Lactantius'; that is Hilary's. Thus Minucius Felix, thus Victorinus, in this manner Arnobius spoke.'
Me too, because he loved me for my companionship with his uncle, he would sometimes bring forward into the midst. By assiduous reading also and long meditation he had made his breast a library of Christ. How often did he entreat me in letters from across the sea to write him something! How often did he set before me the nocturnal petitioner from the Gospel, and the widow importuning the harsh judge! And when I would refuse rather by silence than by letters, and by the shame of one keeping silent would overwhelm the shame of one requesting, he set his uncle before me as an intercessor, who might both plead more freely on another's behalf, and, out of reverence for his priesthood, more easily obtain it. I did therefore what he wished, and by a brief little book consecrated our friendship to eternal memory;
and when he had received it, he boasted that he had surpassed the wealth of Croesus and the riches of Darius. He held it before his eyes, in his bosom, in his hands, upon his lips; and when he frequently unrolled it upon his bed, the sweet page would drop down upon the breast of the sleeper. But if any of the strangers or of his friends came, he rejoiced over himself on account of our testimony, and whatever was less well done in the little work, he compensated for by measured pausing and by variety of delivery, so that in reciting it he seemed daily either to please or to displease. Whence came this fervour, if not from the love of God? Whence this tireless meditation on the law of Christ, if not from longing for Him who gave the law?
Let others add coin to coin, and, stifling their purses, hunt for the wealth of matrons by their obsequiousness; let monks be richer than they had been as men of the world; let them possess wealth under a poor Christ which they had not possessed under a wealthy devil; and let the Church sigh over them as rich, whom the world once held as beggars: our Nepotianus, trampling gold under foot, pursues little scraps of paper. But just as he is a despiser of his own person in the flesh, and walks the more adorned by poverty, so he investigates the whole adornment of the Church. In comparison indeed with the things said above, the things we are about to relate are small; but even in small matters the same spirit is shown.
For just as we admire the Creator not only in heaven and earth, in the sun and the ocean, in elephants, camels, horses, oxen, leopards, bears, and lions, but also in the tiniest creatures — the ant, the gnat, flies, little worms, and things of this kind, whose bodies we know better than their names — and venerate the same skill in them all, so a mind devoted to Christ is equally intent upon greater and lesser things, knowing that an account must be rendered even for an idle word. He was therefore anxious whether the altar shone, whether the walls were free of soot, whether the pavements were wiped clean, whether the doorkeeper was often at his post, whether the veils were always at the doors, whether the sacristy was clean, whether the vessels were gleaming;
and in all the ceremonies his devout solicitude, thus arranged, neglected no duty, whether smaller or greater. Wherever you sought him, in the church you would find him. Antiquity admires the noble man Quintus Fabius, who is also a writer of Roman history, but who won his name more from painting than from letters; and Scripture testifies that our Bezalel was full of wisdom and of the spirit of God, and Hiram also, the son of a Tyrian woman, in that the one fashioned the furniture of the tabernacle, the other of the temple. For just as glad crops and fertile fields sometimes luxuriate in stalks and ears of grain, so illustrious talents and a mind full of virtues overflow into the elegance of the various arts.
Whence also among the Greeks that philosopher is praised who gloried that everything he used, down to his cloak and his ring, was made by his own hand. This same thing we can say also of this man, who would shade the basilicas of the church and the shrines of the martyrs with diverse flowers, with the foliage of trees, and with the tendrils of vines, so that whatever pleased in the church, both in arrangement and in appearance, might bear witness to the labour and the zeal of the presbyter. Well done, valour! What will be the end of one whose beginnings are such? O wretched human condition, and how vain is all that we live without Christ! Why do you withdraw yourself, why do you shrink back, O my discourse? For as though we could defer his death and make his life longer, so we fear to come to the end.
All flesh is grass, and all its glory as the flower of grass. Where now is that comely face, where the dignity of the whole body, with which, as with a beautiful garment, the beauty of the soul was clothed? Alas for grief, the lily withered under the blowing of the south wind, and the purple of the violet passed by degrees into pallor. And when he burned with fever and the heat drained the fountains of his veins, with weary breath he consoled his sorrowful uncle. His face was glad, and while all around him wept, he alone smiled. To cast off his cloak, to stretch out his hands, to see what others did not see, and, as though raising himself to meet them, to greet those who came: you would understand that he was not dying, but departing — and changing his friends, not leaving them.
Tears roll down my face, and with steeled mind I cannot dissemble the grief I suffer. Who would believe that in such an hour he remembered our intimacy, and that, with his soul struggling, he knew the sweetness of our studies? Taking hold of his uncle's hand, 'This tunic,' he said, 'which I wore in the ministry of Christ, send to him who is most beloved of me, a father in age, a brother in the college; and whatever of affection was owed by me, the nephew, to you, transfer it to him whom you loved together with me.' And with such words he breathed his last, holding his uncle by the hand, and touching me in remembrance. I know that you would not have wished to prove the love of the citizens toward you thus, and would rather have sought the affection of your country in prosperity. But an office of this kind is more delightful in good times, more welcome in evil.
The whole city mourned him, all Italy bewailed him. The earth received his body, his soul was rendered back to Christ. You were seeking a nephew, the Church a priest. Your successor has gone before you. What you were, he after you was accounted worthy of by the judgment of all. And thus from one house a double dignity of the pontificate has issued forth: while in the one there is congratulation, that he has held it, in the other there is mourning, that he was snatched away, lest he should hold it. It is Plato's opinion that the whole life of the wise man is a meditation upon death. The philosophers praise this and extol it to heaven; but far more boldly the apostle: 'I die daily,' he says, 'by your glory.' It is one thing to attempt, another to accomplish; one thing to live about to die, another to die about to live. That one is about to die out of glory; this one dies ever unto glory.
We ourselves, therefore, ought to meditate beforehand in our minds upon what we shall one day be, and upon that which — whether we will or not — cannot be far away. For if we should exceed nine hundred years of life, as the human race lived before the flood, and the ages of Methuselah were granted to us, yet the length of the past would be nothing, once it had ceased to be. For indeed, between him who lived ten years and him who lived a thousand, after the same end of life has come and the inescapable necessity of death, all that has passed is equally the same — except that the old man sets out more heavily laden with the burden of his sins. 'The best days flee first for wretched mortals; diseases come on, and sad old age, and toil, and the cruelty of harsh death sweeps all away.' The poet Naevius:
'Necessity,' he says, 'compels a mortal to suffer many evils.' Whence antiquity too feigned that Niobe, because she wept much, was changed into a stone, and others into various beasts (as Hecuba into a dog); and Hesiod, lamenting the births of men, rejoices at their funerals; and Ennius wisely: 'The common people,' he says, 'in this surpass the king: the common people may weep, but the king may not honourably do so.' As with the king, so with the bishop — nay, less with the king than with the bishop. For the king rules over the unwilling, the bishop over the willing; the king subjects by terror, the bishop lords it by service; the king guards bodies unto death, the bishop preserves souls unto life. Upon you the eyes of all are directed, and your house and manner of life, set as it were upon a watchtower, is the mistress of public discipline.
Whatever you do, all men think it must likewise be done by themselves. Beware, then, that you commit nothing which either those who wish to reprove may seem to have worthily torn to pieces, or those who wish to imitate may be compelled into wrongdoing. Overcome, as much as you can — nay, even more than you can — the softness of your mind, and check the tears flowing abundantly, lest a great tenderness toward your nephew be reckoned, among unbelieving minds, as despair toward God. He must be longed for by you as one absent, not as one dead, so that you may seem to be awaiting him, not to have lost him.
But what am I doing, tending a grief which I now suppose has been soothed both by time and by reason, instead of rather setting before you the recent miseries of kings and the calamities of our age, so that he who has been bereft of this light is not so much to be lamented as to be congratulated, in that he has escaped from such great evils? Constantius, the patron of the Arian heresy, while he is arming himself against the enemy and being borne swiftly to battle, dying in the little village of Mopsus, left the empire to his foe with great anguish. Julian, the destroyer of his own soul and the butcher of a Christian army, felt Christ in Media, whom he had first denied in Gaul; and while he sought to extend the boundaries of the Romans, he lost even those already extended.
Jovian, having but tasted the royal blessings, perished suffocated by the fumes of coals, showing to all what human power is. Valentinian, having laid waste his native soil and leaving his fatherland unavenged, was snuffed out by a vomiting of blood. His own brother Valens, defeated in the Gothic war, had in Thrace the same place both of his death and of his tomb. Gratian, betrayed by his own army and not received by the cities he approached, became a mockery to the enemy, and your walls, O Lugdunum, bear witness to the traces of the bloody hand. The young Valentinian, and almost a boy, after flight, after exiles, after an empire recovered with much blood, was slain not far from the city that was privy to his brother's death, and his lifeless corpse was dishonored by hanging.
What shall I say of Procopius, Maximus, Eugenius, who indeed, while they held sway, were a terror to the nations? All, taken captive, stood before the faces of their conquerors, and—what for those once most powerful is most wretched—they were pierced by the ignominy of servitude before ever the enemy's blade transfixed them. Someone may say: 'Such is the lot of kings, and the lightnings strike the highest peaks.' I will come to private ranks, and I will not speak of those that reach beyond two years; and, to pass over the rest, it suffices for us to record the diverse ends of three men lately of consular rank. Abundantius, in need, is an exile at Pityus; the head of Rufinus was borne on a pike to Constantinople, and his severed right hand, to the disgrace of his insatiable avarice, begged for alms from door to door;
Timasius, suddenly cast down from the highest step of dignity, thinks he has escaped because he lives inglorious in the Oasis. It is not the calamities of the wretched, but the frail state of the human condition that I recount—my spirit shudders to pursue the ruins of our times—: for twenty years and more Roman blood is daily poured out between Constantinople and the Julian Alps. Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, Dardania, Dacia, Epirus, Dalmatia and all the Pannonias the Goth, the Sarmatian, the Quadian, the Alan, the Huns, the Vandals, the Marcomanni lay waste, drag off, and plunder. How many matrons, how many virgins of God, and noble, highborn bodies have been made a plaything to these beasts!
Bishops taken captive, priests slain and the ministries of clergy of every rank, churches overthrown, horses stabled at the altars of Christ, the relics of the martyrs dug up: everywhere mourning, everywhere groaning, and the manifold image of death. The Roman world is falling, and yet our neck, held erect, is not bowed. What state of mind do you suppose the Corinthians now have, the Athenians, the Lacedaemonians, the Arcadians, and all Greece, over whom the barbarians rule? And surely I have named but a few cities, in which of old there were kingdoms of no mean account. The East seemed exempt from these evils, and was dismayed only by reports: behold now, in the past year, the wolves—not of Arabia but of the North—loosed upon us from the farthest crags of the Caucasus, overran so many provinces in a brief span.
How many monasteries were seized, how great the volumes of river-water turned by human gore! Antioch was besieged, and the remaining cities past which flow the Halys, the Cydnus, the Orontes, and the Euphrates. Droves of captives were dragged off; Arabia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt were captive with fear. Not if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths and a voice of iron could I run through all the names of the torments. For I have not set out to write history, but briefly to weep for our miseries. Otherwise, to unfold these things worthily, even Thucydides and Sallust fall mute. Happy is Nepotian, who does not see these things; happy, who does not hear them. Wretched are we, who either suffer, or, suffering, look on while our brothers endure so much;
and yet we wish to live, and we deem those who are free of these things rather to be wept for than counted blessed. We perceive that God was long since offended, and we do not appease Him. By our sins the barbarians are strong, by our vices the Roman army is overcome; and, as though this were not enough for our disasters, civil wars have consumed almost more than the enemy's blade. Wretched were the Israelites, in comparison with whom Nebuchadnezzar is written down as the servant of God; unhappy are we, who so displease God that His wrath rages against us through the frenzy of the barbarians. Hezekiah did penance, and a hundred and eighty-five thousand of the Assyrians were destroyed by one angel in a single night; Jehoshaphat sang praises in concert to the Lord, and the Lord conquered on behalf of him who praised;
Moses fought against Amalek not with the sword but with prayer. If we wish to be raised up, let us be laid low. O the shame, and the mind foolish even to the point of unbelief! The Roman army, victor and lord of the world, is conquered by these, dreads these, is terrified at the sight of these—men who cannot even walk, who, if they touch the ground, count themselves as dead—and we do not understand the words of the prophets: a thousand shall flee at the pursuit of one; nor do we cut away the causes of the disease, that the disease may be removed with them, and then straightway behold arrows give way to javelins, tiaras to helmets, nags to horses? We have exceeded the measure of consolation, and, while forbidding grief for one man's death, we have bewailed the dead of the whole world.
Xerxes, that most mighty king, who overthrew mountains and paved over the seas, when from a lofty place he had beheld an infinite multitude of men and a countless army, is said to have wept—because after a hundred years not one of those he then looked upon would survive. Oh, if we could climb to such a watchtower, from which we might behold the whole earth beneath our feet! Then I would show you the ruins of the entire world, nations dashed against nations and kingdoms against kingdoms; some being tortured, some slain, some overwhelmed by the waves, some dragged off into slavery; here a wedding, there a lament; these being born, those dying; some overflowing with riches, others begging;
and not only Xerxes' army, but all the men of the whole world who now live, will be no more in a brief span. Speech is overcome by the greatness of the matter, and all that we say is too little. Let us therefore return to ourselves and, as though descending from heaven, let us for a little while regard our own affairs. Do you perceive, I beseech you, when you became an infant, when a boy, when a youth, when of vigorous age, when an old man? Daily we die, daily we are changed, and yet we believe ourselves to be eternal. This very thing which I dictate, which is written, which I read over, which I correct, is being drawn out of my life. As many dots as the scribe makes, so many are the losses of my times.
We write and write back, letters cross the seas, and as the keel cuts its furrows, with each wave the moments of our life grow fewer. This alone we have for gain, that we are united by the love of Christ. Charity is patient, is kind; charity envies not, deals not perversely, is not puffed up, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things; charity never fails. This ever lives in the heart; through it our Nepotian, though absent, is present, and, though we are sundered by such vast spaces of lands, it embraces us both with either hand. We hold a pledge of mutual charity. Let us be joined in spirit, bound fast in affection, and let us imitate in the son that fortitude of mind which the blessed bishop Chromatius showed at the falling-asleep of his brother.
Let our little page sing of him, let all my letters resound with him. Him whom we cannot hold in the body, let us hold in remembrance, and of him with whom we cannot speak, let us never cease to speak. LXI. TO VIGILANTIUS. It would indeed have been just to give you no satisfaction at all by letter, you who did not trust your own ears—for neither can you rest content with a written sheet, you who lent no credence to living speech—; but because Christ has bestowed on us in Himself the pattern of perfect humility, granting a kiss to the betrayer and receiving on the gibbet the penitence of the thief, I signify to you in your absence the same things I also spoke when present: namely, that I have read and do read Origen just as I read Apollinaris and the other commentators, whose books in certain respects the Church does not receive;
not that I say all things contained in their volumes are to be condemned, but that I confess certain things are to be censured. But because it belongs to my work and my study to read many authors, so that from very many I may pluck diverse flowers—not so much intending to approve everything as to select what is good—I take many up in my hand, that from many I may learn many things, according to what is written: reading all things, holding fast what is good. Hence I greatly marvel that you were minded to cast Origen's dogmas in my teeth, whose error in most points you are, even to this age, wholly ignorant of. Am I a heretic? And why then, I ask, do the heretics not love me? Are you orthodox?