Letters (CSEL) 1 part 31/85

I hear that you have made a hospice at the Roman port, and have planted a shoot from Abraham's tree upon the Ausonian shore. Like Aeneas you measure out a new camp, even upon the wave of the Tiber, where he once, driven by want, did not spare the fated crusts and the broad quarters of bread; you build our little town — that is, 'the house of bread' — and make up for long famine with sudden plenty. Well done, our friend, outstripping the beginnings! At once you hold the summit; from the root you come to the top; first among monks in the first city, you first follow the patriarch. Let Lot — which is interpreted 'declining' — choose the plains, and, according to the letter of Pythagoras, pursue rather the easy things, the left-hand things, and the things that perish;

but do you, on steep and rocky heights, with Sarah prepare a tomb for yourself, so that the city of letters may be near, and, the giant sons of Anak being destroyed, 'joy and laughter' may receive your inheritance. Abraham was rich in gold, silver, cattle, possessions, garments, and he had so great a household that at sudden tidings he could arm an army of chosen young men and, overtaking in Dan the four kings before whom five kings had fled, could slay them. And yet, after by the frequent duty of hospitality — while not refusing men — he had deserved to receive God, he did not command his menservants and maidservants to minister to the guests, nor diminish through others the good that he practiced, but, as though he had come upon booty, he alone, with his Sarah, devoted himself to kindness.

He himself washed feet, he himself carried the fat calf on his shoulders from the herd, he stood like a servant while the strangers dined, and with his own hands set before them cooked food, himself about to fast. This I counsel, dearest brother, out of the love with which I cherish you: that you offer to Christ not only your money, but your very self, a living sacrifice, pleasing to God, your reasonable service; and that you imitate the Son of Man, who came not to be ministered unto, but to minister; and what the patriarch showed to strangers, this the Master and Lord showed to his disciples and servants. 'Skin for skin, and all that a man possesses, he will give for his life. But touch,' says the devil, 'his flesh, and see whether he will not bless you to your face.' The ancient enemy knows that the struggle of continence is greater than that of coin.

Easily is that cast off which clings on the outside; an inner war is more perilous. We unglue what is joined, we rend apart what is united. Zacchaeus was rich, the apostles poor. He restored fourfold what he had seized, and divided among the poor half of the substance that remained; he received Christ as guest, and salvation came to his house. And yet, because he was little of stature and could not stretch himself to the apostolic height, he was not in the number of the twelve apostles. The apostles, however, as regards riches, left nothing, but as regards their will, left the whole world alike. If we offer to Christ our wealth together with our soul, he gladly receives it;

but if we give to God the things that are outside, and to the devil the things that are within, the division is not fair, and it is said to us: 'If you offer rightly but do not divide rightly, have you not sinned?' That, being of patrician birth, you have begun to be first among the first as a monk — let this be for you an occasion not of pride but of humility, since you know that the Son of God became the Son of Man. However much you cast yourself down, you will not be humbler than Christ. Suppose you go on foot, clothe yourself in a dark tunic, make yourself equal to the poor, condescend to enter the cells of the needy, be an eye to the blind, a hand to the weak, a foot to the lame; suppose you yourself carry water, split wood, build the fire — where are the chains? Where the blows? Where the spittle? Where the scourges? Where the gibbet? Where death?

And when you have done all the things I have said, you will be surpassed by your Eustochium and Paula — if not in deed, yet certainly in sex. I indeed was not at Rome, and the desert held me then — and would that it had held me fast! — when, while your father-in-law Toxotius was still living, they were serving the world; but nevertheless I hear:

they who could not endure the filth of the streets, who were carried in the hands of eunuchs and crossed uneven ground with much annoyance, to whom silk clothing was a burden and the sun's heat a burning — now, unkempt and mourning, and by comparison with their former selves grown a little sturdy, they either trim the lamps or kindle the fire, sweep the floors, clean the vegetables, throw bundles of greens into the boiling pot, set the tables, hand out cups, pour out the food, and run to and fro. And surely a great choir of virgins dwells with them. Could they not command such services to others? But they are unwilling to be surpassed in bodily labor by those whom they themselves surpass in virtue of soul.

These things I say, not because I have any doubt about the ardor of your mind, but that I may urge on the runner and, by my favor, increase the fervor of one who fights keenly. We, in this province, having built a monastery and erected a guest-lodging beside it — lest perchance even now Joseph, coming with Mary to Bethlehem, should find no lodging — are overwhelmed by such crowds of monks flowing together from the whole world, that we can neither desert the work begun nor bear it beyond our strength.

Whence, because that saying of the Gospel has almost befallen us — that we did not first reckon the cost of the tower to be built — we were compelled to send our brother Paulinianus to our homeland, that he might sell the half-ruined little farms which escaped the hands of the barbarians, and the ashes of our common parents, lest, by deserting the holy ministry we have begun, we should offer a laughingstock to slanderers and rivals. At the close of my letter I remembered your four-horse team, and that a fifth, Blesilla, is lacking to the design — I had almost forgotten to speak of her who, first of you, went ahead to the Lord. Truly now we see the five divided into three and two: she, with her sister Paulina, enjoys sweet sleep; you, in the midst of the two, will more lightly fly up to Christ. LXVII. LETTER OF AUGUSTINE TO JEROME.

To the most beloved lord, and to the brother and fellow-presbyter Jerome, to be honored and embraced with the most sincere devotion of charity, Augustine. I am grateful that in return for the subscribed salutation you have rendered me a full letter — but much shorter than I would wish to receive from you, from such a man, from whom, however much the times may occupy him, no discourse is too long. Although, therefore, we are hemmed in by the huge cares of others' affairs, and those secular ones, yet I would not easily forgive the brevity of your letter, did I not consider with how few words of my own it would be requited. Wherefore, I beg, take up with us this literary conversation, lest bodily absence be allowed to disjoin us much;

although we are joined in the Lord by unity of spirit, even if we rest from the pen and keep silence. And indeed the books which you have wrought out of the Lord's storehouse present almost the whole of you to us. For if we do not know you because we have not seen the face of your body, in that way you do not know yourself either; for you too do not see it. But if you are known to yourself for no other reason than that you know your own mind, we also know it not slightly in your writings, in which we bless the Lord that he has given you such as you are to yourself and to us and to all the brethren who read your works. A certain book of yours, among the rest, came into our hands not long ago. What its title is, we do not yet know;

for the codex itself did not, as is usual, display it on the opening page. Yet the brother in whose possession it was found said it was called 'Epitaph.' We would believe that this name pleased you to be given to it, if we had read there only the lives or writings of those who were already dead; but since the works of many are commemorated there who were living both at the time it was written and even now, we wonder why you either imposed this title on it, or are believed to have imposed it. Certainly we quite approve that this same book was usefully composed by you. In your exposition too of the apostle Paul's letter to the Galatians we have found something that troubles us much.

For if into the holy Scriptures there be admitted, as it were, dutiful lies, what authority will remain in them? What sentence, then, will be brought forward from those Scriptures, by whose weight the wickedness of contentious falsehood may be crushed? For as soon as you bring one forward, if he who strives against it thinks otherwise, he will say that what has been brought forward the writer feigned out of some honorable duty. For where will this not be possible, if it was possible in that narrative which the Apostle began, saying: 'But the things which I write to you, behold, before God, I lie not' — and yet be believed and affirmed to have lied in that place where he said of Peter and Barnabas: 'When I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the Gospel'? For if they were walking uprightly, then he lied;

but if he lied there, where did he speak the truth? Or will he seem to have spoken the truth there where he said what the reader approves, while, when something occurs contrary to the reader's judgment, it will be reckoned a dutiful lie? For causes will not be lacking why he might be thought not only to have been able, but even to have been bound, to lie, if a place be granted to this rule. There is no need to plead this cause with many words, especially with you, to whom, wisely providing, a single word is enough. By no means, indeed, would I arrogate to myself the presumption of striving to enrich with my small coins your talent, made golden by a divine gift; nor is there anyone more fit than you to amend that work. For you need not be taught by me how to understand what the same Apostle says:

'I became to the Jews as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews' — and the rest, which are there said out of merciful compassion, not deceitful pretense. For he becomes like a sick man who ministers to a sick man, not when he feigns that he has fevers, but when, with the mind of one who grieves along with the sufferer, he considers how he would wish to be served if he himself were ill. For he was indeed a Jew; but, having become a Christian, he had not abandoned the sacraments of the Jews, which that people had fittingly and lawfully received at the time when it was proper.

And therefore he undertook to observe them, when he was already an apostle of Christ, but in order to teach that they were not harmful to those who wished to keep them, as they had received them from their fathers through the Law, even after they had believed in Christ — provided they did not now place in them the hope of salvation, since through the Lord Jesus salvation itself, which was signified by those sacraments, had come. And therefore he judged that they were by no means to be imposed upon the Gentiles, since they would recall the unaccustomed from the faith by a grievous and unnecessary burden. Wherefore he did not correct Peter for this, that he observed the ancestral traditions — for if he had wished to do so, he would do it neither mendaciously nor unfittingly;

for although now superfluous, yet the customary things would do no harm — but because he was compelling the Gentiles to judaize, which he could in no way do unless he acted thus, as though even now, after the Lord's coming, they were necessary to salvation; and this the truth strongly dissuaded through the apostolate of Paul. Nor was the apostle Peter ignorant of this, but he did it out of fear of those who were of the circumcision. Thus both he himself was truly corrected, and Paul narrated true things, lest holy Scripture, which was set forth for the faith of posterity, should — once the authority of a lie is admitted — waver and fluctuate wholly in doubt. For it neither can nor ought to be explained in writing how great and how inexplicable the evils are that would follow, if we granted this;

yet it could be shown opportunely and less dangerously, if we were to converse face to face. This, then, of the Jews Paul had abandoned — the evil that they had — and in the first place that, being ignorant of God's righteousness and wishing to establish their own righteousness, they were not subject to the righteousness of God; then that, after the passion and resurrection of Christ, when the sacrament of grace according to the order of Melchizedek had been given and made manifest, they still thought that the old sacraments were to be observed, not from the custom of a solemn rite, but from a necessity of salvation — sacraments which, however, if they had never been necessary, then in vain and to no purpose would the Maccabean martyrs have died for them;

lastly, that the Jews persecuted the Christian preachers of grace as though they were enemies of the Law. These and errors and vices of this kind he says he counted as losses and dung, that he might gain Christ — not the observances of the Law, if they were kept after the ancestral manner, as they were kept by himself without any necessity of salvation, as the Jews thought they must be kept, or with a deceitful pretense, which he had reproved in Peter.

For if he observed those sacraments for this reason, that he pretended to be a Jew in order to gain them, why did he not also sacrifice with the Gentiles, since to those also who were without the Law he became as one without the Law, that he might gain them too — unless because he did the former as by nature a Jew, and said all this not in order to feign deceitfully that he was what he was not, but that he might mercifully perceive that help must be given in such a way, as if he himself labored under the same error — not, that is, by the cunning of one who lies, but by the affection of one who suffers along with them? Just as in that very place he generally added: 'I became weak to the weak, that I might gain the weak,' so that the conclusion that follows,

'I became all things to all men, that I might gain all,' is to be understood as referring to this: that he may appear to have pitied each one's weakness as though it were his own. For neither, when he said: 'Who is weak, and I am not weak?' did he wish it understood that he simulated another's weakness rather than that he suffered along with it. Wherefore lay hold, I beseech you, of a noble and truly Christian severity together with charity, to correct and amend that work, and sing, as they say, a 'palinode.' For incomparably more beautiful is the truth of the Christians than the Helen of the Greeks. For our martyrs have fought more bravely for her against this Sodom than those heroes fought for the other against Troy.

Nor do I say this that you may recover the eyes of your heart — which God forbid that you have lost — but that you may turn them back, which, though you have them sound and watchful, you have by I know not what dissembling turned away, so as not to attend to the adverse things that follow, if once it be believed that a writer of the divine books could, honorably and piously, lie in some part of his work. I had already once written a letter to you from here, which was not delivered, because the man to whom I had given it to deliver did not proceed. From that letter this was suggested to me, while I was dictating these things, which in this one too I ought not to pass over: that, if your opinion is other and the same is better, you may gladly forgive my fear.

For if you think otherwise and you think the truth — for unless it be true, it cannot be better — then, not to say by no fault, at least by no great fault does my error favor the truth, if in any matter truth can rightly favor a lie. As for what you have deigned to write back concerning Origen, I already knew that not only in ecclesiastical writings, but in all, we ought to approve and praise whatever right and true things we may find, but to disapprove and reprove what is false and depraved. But this I desired, and still desire, from your prudence and learning: that you make known to us those very errors of his by which so great a man is convicted of having departed from the faith of the truth.

In the book too, in which you commemorated all the ecclesiastical writers whom you were able to recall, and their writings, it would be done more suitably, as I think, if, having named those whom you know to be heretics — since you were unwilling to pass over even them — you also added in what respects they were to be guarded against; although you have passed over some as well, and I should like to know with what design this was done.

Or if perhaps you were unwilling to burden that volume, so as not to add, to the heretics commemorated, in what points the catholic authority has condemned them, I beg — let it not be a burden to your literary labor, by which, through our Lord's grace, you have not slightly both kindled and aided the studies of the saints in the Latin tongue (this it is that fraternal charity enjoins upon you through my humble self) — that, if your occupations permit, you set forth in one little book, briefly arranged, the perverse dogmas of all the heretics who, down to this time, have tried by impudence or obstinacy to corrupt the rectitude of the Christian faith, for the knowledge of those who either have no leisure because of other business, or are unable, because of a foreign language, to read and learn so many things.

I would ask you at length, were this not wont to be a sign of one who presumes too little on charity. Meanwhile this Paul, our brother in Christ, I much commend to your kindness, to whose reputation in our regions we bear good witness before God. LXVIII. TO CASTRICIANUS. My holy son Heraclius the deacon reported to me that, out of longing for us, you had come as far as Cissa, and that, being a Pannonian man — that is, an earthly creature — you did not fear to face the tides of the Adriatic Sea and the perils of the Aegean and Ionian, and that, had not the pious affection of the brethren held you back, you would have fulfilled your will in deed. I am therefore grateful, and count it as received;

for in friends it is not the deed that is sought, but the will, since the one is often offered even by enemies, while the other charity alone bestows. And at the same time I beseech you: do not reckon that the bodily weakness which you endure has befallen you because of sin — a thing which indeed even the apostles suspected concerning him who had been born blind from the womb, when, asking the Lord Savior, 'Did this man sin, or his parents, that he should be born thus?' they hear: 'Neither this man nor his parents; but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.'

For how many pagans, Jews, heretics, and men of diverse doctrines do we behold wallowing in the mire of lusts, dripping with blood, surpassing wolves in ferocity and kites in rapine — and nonetheless the scourge does not draw near their tent, nor are they beaten together with men, and therefore they grow proud against God, and their mouth passes even up to heaven — while, on the contrary, we know holy men to be tormented by sicknesses, miseries, and want, who perhaps say: 'Then in vain have I sanctified my soul and washed my hands among the innocent'; and at once, reproaching themselves, they say: 'If I should tell it thus, behold, I have condemned the generation of your children.'

If you think the cause of blindness to be sin, and that it brings on the wrath of God — a thing which physicians frequently cure — you will accuse Isaac, who was so far deprived of this light that, deceived by error, he even blessed one whom he did not intend; you will lay the charge upon Jacob, whose sight had grown dim and who, though with his inner eyes and prophetic spirit he foresaw things far in the future and sang that Christ would come from the royal tribe, yet could not see Ephraim and Manasseh. What among kings was holier than Josiah? He was run through by an Egyptian blade. What more sublime than Peter and Paul? They stained the sword of Nero with their blood. And — to say nothing of men — the Son of God endured the ignominy of the cross; and do you count those blessed who enjoy the happiness and delights of this world?

Great is the wrath, when God is not angry at sinners. Whence also in Ezekiel to Jerusalem: 'I will no longer,' he says, 'be angry with you, and my jealousy has departed from you.' For whom the Lord loves, he chastens; and he scourges every son whom he receives. A father does not instruct any but him whom he loves; a master does not correct a disciple except him whom he perceives to be of keener talent. A physician, if he ceases to treat, despairs. But if you answer, how Lazarus received evils in his life — willingly now will I endure torments, that future glory may be reserved for me; for the Lord will not take vengeance twice for the same thing. Why Job, a man holy and immaculate and just in his generation, suffered so much, is contained in his own book.

And lest, by unrolling old histories, I make this long and exceed the measure of a letter, I will relate to you a brief little tale which happened in the times of my childhood. When the blessed Antony had been summoned to the city by the holy Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, for the refutation of the heretics, and Didymus, a most learned man, deprived of his eyes, had gone to him, amid the other conversations which they were holding about the holy Scriptures, when Antony admired his talent and praised the keenness of his mind, he asked inquiringly: 'Are you not sad that you lack the eyes of the flesh?' When Didymus was silent for shame, asking a second and a third time, he at last drew it out, so that he simply confessed the grief of his soul. To him Antony said:

'I wonder,' he said, 'that a prudent man should grieve at the loss of that which ants and flies and gnats possess, and not rejoice in the possession of that which the saints and apostles alone have merited.' From this you clearly perceive that it is far better to see with the spirit than with the flesh, and to possess those eyes into which the mote of sin cannot fall. Although you have not come to us this year, yet we do not despair of your coming. But if the holy deacon, the bearer of these letters, should again be ensnared in your embraces, and, accompanied by him, you come here, I will gladly accept a delay in the arrangement, doubled by the greatness of the interest. LXIX. TO OCEANUS.

Never, my son Oceanus, did I think it would come to pass that the clemency of the prince should incur the calumny of the accused, and that those going forth from prison, after the filth and traces of chains, should grieve that others had been released. In the Gospel the envier of another's salvation hears: 'Friend, if I am good, why is your eye evil?' God has shut up all things under sin, that he might have mercy upon all. Where sin abounded, grace has superabounded. The firstborn of Egypt were slain, and not even an Israelite beast of burden was left behind in Egypt. And there rises up against me the heresy of Cain, and the viper long since dead lifts up its crushed head — a heresy which overturns the sacrament of Christ not in part, as it was formerly wont, but wholly.

For by saying that there are some things which Christ cannot cleanse by his blood, and that scars of former crimes are branded so deeply upon bodies and souls that they cannot be lessened by his medicine — what else does it do but make Christ to have died in vain? And he has died in vain, if he cannot give life to some. John the Baptist lies, pointing out Christ with finger and voice: 'Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world' — if there are still in the world any whose sins Christ has not taken away. For either it must be shown that those whom Christ's indulgence does not know are not of the world, or, if they are of the world, one of two must be chosen: those freed from their sins prove Christ's power, those still guilty prove his weakness.

But far be it from us to believe of the Almighty that in anything He is powerless. All things that the Father does, the Son likewise does. The weakness of the Son redounds upon the Father. All the limbs of the little ewe were carried; the whole of the Apostle's epistles resound with the grace of Christ. And lest the mere naming of grace should seem too plain, 'grace,' he says, 'and peace be multiplied unto you.' Multiplication is promised, yet we affirm scarcity? To what purpose all this? You know your own problem: Carterius, a bishop of Spain, a man aged both in years and in the priesthood, took one wife before he was baptized, and, after the first had died, took another after the laver of baptism;

and you suppose that he acted contrary to the Apostle's ruling, who in the catalogue of virtues laid down that a bishop to be ordained must be the husband of one wife. But I marvel that you have dragged one man alone into the open, when the whole world is full of such ordinations. I say nothing of presbyters, nothing of the lower ranks: I come to bishops, and if I should wish to name them one by one, so great a number will be gathered that the multitude of the Synod of Rimini would be outdone. But it is unseemly so to defend one man that you seem to accuse many, and that him whom you cannot defend by reason you should defend by the fellowship of sinners. At Rome I once endured from a most eloquent man a syllogism, horned, as they say, so that whichever way I turned, I was held fast in its grip.

'To take a wife,' he said, 'is it a sin or not?' I, being simple and not knowing how to avoid snares, granted that it was not a sin. Again he proposed another point: 'In baptism are good works remitted, or evil ones?' And here with the same simplicity I answered that sins are remitted. When I thought myself safe, horns began to sprout upon me from this side and that, and the point of the sword, before hidden, was unsheathed. 'If,' he said, 'to take a wife is not a sin, but baptism remits sins, then whatever is not remitted is reserved.' At once, as if I had been struck by a most powerful boxer, a fog began to swim before my eyes, and I straightway recalled the sophism of Chrysippus:

if you are lying and you say this truly, then you are lying.' And, coming back to myself, I turned back against my adversary the trick of his own proposition. 'I beg you,' I said, 'answer me: does baptism make a new man, or not?' Reluctantly he granted that it makes him new. Step by step I pressed on: 'Does it make him new wholly, or in part?' He answered: 'Wholly.' Then I asked further: 'Is nothing then of the old man reserved in baptism?' He shook his head. Straightway I began to weave my net: 'If baptism makes a new man and creates him wholly new, and nothing of the old man is reserved in him, then that cannot be imputed to the new man which once was in the old.' At first our little thorn-bush fell dumb; but afterwards, by the fault of Piso, though he knew not how to speak, he could not keep silence.

Yet his brow began to sweat, his cheeks to pale, his lips to tremble, his tongue to falter, his spittle to dry up, and to shrink more from fear than from age. At last he burst out: 'Have you not read that by the Apostle the husband of one wife is taken into the priesthood, and that the matter, not the time, is defined?' Since he had provoked me with syllogisms, and I saw the man tending toward tortuous little questions, I hurled his own weapons back against him. 'Did the Apostle,' I said, 'choose the baptized for the episcopate, or catechumens?' He would not answer. Yet I kept pressing that same point, and inquired a second and a third time. You would have thought him Niobe. I turn to the audience: