Letters (CSEL) 1 part 33/85

Nor is it any wonder if among the Latins a translation rendered word for word does not preserve the metre, seeing that even Homer, turned into prose in his own tongue, scarcely hangs together. In another letter too he sets down an iambic line of Menander: Evil communications corrupt good manners. And disputing among the Athenians in the court of Mars, he calls Aratus to witness: For we are also his offspring — which in Greek runs: tou gar kai genos esmen — and it forms the close of a heroic verse. And that this might not be too little, the leader of the Christian host and unconquered orator, pleading his cause for Christ, turns even a chance inscription upon an altar into an argument for the faith. For he had learned from the true David to wrest the sword from the hands of his enemies and to cut off the head of the most arrogant Goliath with his own blade.

He had read in Deuteronomy the command given by the Lord's own voice, that a captive woman must have her head shaved, her eyebrows, all her hair and the nails of her body cut off, and thus be taken in marriage. What wonder then, if I too desire to make of worldly wisdom — for the grace of its eloquence and the beauty of its members — an Israelite woman out of a handmaid and captive; if whatever in her is dead through idolatry, pleasure, error, or lust, I either cut away or shave off, and, joined to a body most pure, beget from her home-born servants for the Lord of Sabaoth? My labour profits the household of Christ; adultery in another woman only increases the number of fellow-servants.

Hosea takes a wife, the daughter of Debelaim — that is, of sweetnesses — and there is born to him of a harlot a son, Jezreel, who is called 'the seed of God'; Isaiah shaves the beard and the legs of sinners with a sharp razor; Ezekiel, as a figure of fornicating Jerusalem, shears off his own hair, that whatever in her is without sense and life may be taken away. Cyprian, a man mighty both in eloquence and in martyrdom, is bitten by Firmian's account, for having, when writing against Demetrian, used the testimonies of the prophets and apostles — which the other reckoned feigned and fictitious — rather than those of the philosophers and poets, against whose authority, as a heathen, he could not go. Celsus and Porphyry wrote against us:

Against the former Origen replied, against the latter Methodius, Eusebius, and Apollinaris most vigorously. Of these Origen wrote eight books, Methodius proceeds to as many as ten thousand lines, Eusebius and Apollinaris composed twenty-five and thirty volumes. Read them, and you will find us most unskilled by comparison with them, and, after so long a leisure, scarcely able to recall, as if in a dream, what we learned as boys. Julian Augustus in the Parthian campaign vomited forth seven books against Christ, and, as the poets' fables tell, mangled himself with his own sword. If I should attempt to write against him, I suppose you would forbid me to beat back the rabid dog with the doctrines of philosophers and historians — that is, with the club of Hercules?

And yet he straightway felt our Nazarene — and, as he himself was wont to call Him, the Galilean — in the battle, and received the reward of his most foul tongue when his entrails were pierced through by a lance. Josephus, in proving the antiquity of the Jewish people, writes two books against Apion the Alexandrian grammarian, and adduces so many testimonies of secular writers that it comes upon me as a marvel how a Hebrew, trained from infancy in the sacred writings, could have unrolled the whole library of the Greeks. What shall I say of Philo, whom the critics pronounce either a second Plato or a Jewish Plato? Let me run through them one by one:

Quadratus, a disciple of the apostles and bishop of the church of Athens, did he not, when the emperor Hadrian was visiting the Eleusinian mysteries, present him with a book on behalf of our religion, and prove of such admiration to all, that his surpassing genius allayed a most grievous persecution? Aristides the philosopher, a most eloquent man, offered to the same prince an Apology for the Christians woven together from the opinions of the philosophers; whom Justin, himself also a philosopher, afterward imitated, and delivered to Antoninus Pius and his sons and the senate a book against the heathen, defending the shame of the cross and proclaiming with all freedom the resurrection of Christ.

What shall I say of Melito, bishop of Sardis; what of Apollinaris, priest of the church of Hierapolis, and Dionysius, bishop of the Corinthians, and Tatian and Bardesanes and Irenaeus, successor of the martyr Pothinus, who in many volumes set forth the origins of the several heresies and from what fountains of the philosophers they had flowed? Pantaenus, a philosopher of the Stoic sect, on account of the glory of his surpassing learning, was sent to India by Demetrius, bishop of Alexandria, to preach Christ among the Brahmans and the philosophers of that nation. Clement, presbyter of the church of Alexandria, a man in my judgment the most learned of all, wrote eight books of Stromata and as many of Hypotyposes, and another against the heathen, and also three volumes of the Paedagogus.

What in these works is unlearned — nay, what is not drawn from the very heart of philosophy? Imitating him, Origen wrote ten books of Stromata, comparing together the opinions of Christians and philosophers, and confirming all the dogmas of our religion out of Plato and Aristotle, Numenius and Cornutus. Miltiades too wrote an excellent volume against the heathen, and Hippolytus, and Apollonius a senator of the city of Rome, composed works of their own.

There survive also the books of Julius Africanus, who wrote histories of the times, and of Theodore, who was afterward called Gregory, a man of apostolic signs and miracles, and of Dionysius bishop of Alexandria, and of Anatolius too, priest of the church of Laodicea; likewise of the presbyters Pamphilus, Pierius, Lucian, Malchion; of Eusebius bishop of Caesarea, and Eustathius of Antioch and Athanasius of Alexandria; of Eusebius of Emesa too, and Triphyllius of Cyprus, and Asterius of Scythopolis, and Serapion the confessor; of Titus also, bishop of Bostra, and of the Cappadocians Basil, Gregory, and Amphilochius:

all of whom so stuffed their books with the doctrines and opinions of the philosophers, that you would not know which you ought first to admire in them, their worldly erudition or their knowledge of the Scriptures. Let me come to the Latins. What is more learned, what more acute, than Tertullian? His Apology and his books against the heathen contain the whole learning of the age. Minucius Felix, a pleader of the Roman bar, in the book entitled 'Octavius,' and in the other against the astrologers — if indeed the title does not belie the author — what of Gentile letters did he leave untouched? Arnobius published seven books against the heathen, and as many his disciple Lactantius, who also composed two volumes, On the Wrath of God and On the Workmanship of God;

if you should be willing to read these, you will find in them an epitome of Cicero's dialogues. In the books of Victorinus the martyr, though learning is lacking, yet the will to learning is not lacking. Cyprian — with what brevity, with what knowledge of all histories, with what splendour of words and thoughts did he touch upon the theme that the idols are not gods! Hilary, a confessor and bishop of my own times, imitated Quintilian's twelve books both in style and in number, and in the brief little book which he wrote against Dioscorus the physician he showed what he could accomplish in letters. Juvencus the presbyter, under Constantine, set forth the history of the Lord and Saviour in verse, nor did he fear to bring the majesty of the Gospel under the laws of metre.

Of the rest, whether dead or living, I am silent, since from their own writings both their powers and their purpose are manifest. Nor let yourself be deceived at once by the false opinion that this was permitted only against the heathen, but must be dissembled in other disputations, since almost all the books of almost all men — save those who have not learned letters together with Epicurus — are full to the brim of erudition and learning. And yet I rather think this — which comes into my mind as I dictate — that you are not ignorant of what has always been the practice of learned men, but that a question is put to me through you by another, who perhaps, out of love for Sallust's Histories, may be a Calpurnius surnamed Lanarius. I beg you to persuade him not, being toothless, to envy the teeth of those who eat, and not, being a mole, to despise the eyes of the roe-deer.

Rich, as you see, is the material for discussion, but now it must be brought to an end by the narrowness of a letter. LETTER 71. TO LUCINUS OF BAETICA. When I was not expecting it, your letter was suddenly delivered to me, which, the more unhoped-for it was, the more full of joys it roused my resting soul, so that at once I embraced with love one whom I did not know by sight, and mused thus silently within myself: Who will give me wings like a dove, and I will fly and be at rest, that I may find him whom my soul has loved? Truly now in you the Lord's word has been fulfilled: Many shall come from the east and the west and shall recline in the bosom of Abraham. Cornelius, centurion of the Italian cohort, even then prefigured the faith of my Lucinus. The apostle Paul, writing to the Romans:

When I have set out to journey into Spain, I hope that on my way I may see you and be brought forward thither by you — by such abundant fruits he proved what he sought from that province. In a short time, casting the foundations of the Gospel from Jerusalem as far as Illyricum, he enters Rome in chains, that he might make free those bound in the errors of superstition. He remains for two years in a hired lodging, that he might render to you an eternal home of both Testaments. The fisher of men, casting his apostolic net, drew you too, like a most beautiful gilthead, to the shore from among the countless kinds of fishes.

You have left the bitter waves, the salt whirlpools, the clefts of the mountains, and Leviathan reigning in the waters, and, with Jesus seeking the desert, you have despised them, that you might be able to sing that word of the prophet: In a land desert and pathless and waterless, so have I appeared to you in the sanctuary; and again: Behold, I have gone far off, fleeing, and have abode in the wilderness. I waited for Him who has saved me from faintness of spirit and from the tempest.

I therefore beseech and admonish you with a parent's affection, that you who have left Sodom, hastening to the mountains, may not look back behind you; may never let go the plough-handle, nor the fringe of the Saviour's garment, nor His locks wet with the dew of night, once you have begun to hold them; may not descend from the housetop of the virtues to seek your former garments; may not return from the field to your house; may not, with Lot, love the plains and the pleasant places of gardens, which are not watered from heaven like the holy land, but from the turbid river of Jordan, after it has changed its sweet waters by mingling with the Dead Sea. To have begun belongs to many; to have reached the goal, to few. They that run in the stadium all run indeed, but one receives the crown. Yet on the contrary it is said to us:

So run that you may lay hold. Our judge of the games is not envious, nor does one man's palm procure another's disgrace. He desires all His athletes to be crowned. My soul rejoices, and out of the greatness of gladness I suffer the burden of grief, so that words break forth into tears. Zacchaeus the publican, at the conversion of a single hour, deserved to have the Saviour as his guest; Martha and Mary, when the banquet was prepared, to receive the Lord. The harlot washes His feet with weeping, and with the ointments of good works consecrates the burial of the Lord's body. Simon the leper invites the Master with His disciples, and is not despised. To Abraham it is said: Go forth from your land and from your kindred and from your father's house, and go into the land which I shall show you.

He leaves Chaldaea, he leaves Mesopotamia; he seeks what he does not know, lest he lose Him whom he had found. For he judged that he could not have both his fatherland and his Lord at once, but even then he was fulfilling in deed that word of the prophet David: I am a stranger with you and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. A Hebrew — that is, a 'passer-over' and one who crosses over — while he is not content with present virtue, but forgetting the things behind, stretches himself forward to the future, and knows that saying, They shall go from virtue to virtue, obtained a mystical name and opened for you the way, how you should seek not the things that are your own but those of another, and reckon as parents, brothers, kinsmen, and relations those who have been joined to you in Christ.

My mother, He says, and my brethren are these who do the will of my Father. You have with you as your companion one who was first in the flesh, now in the spirit; a sister made of a wife, a man made of a woman, an equal made of a subordinate, who under the same yoke may hasten with you together toward the heavenly kingdoms. A careful management of household affairs, coming back to its reckonings, is not quickly laid aside. Joseph could not escape the Egyptian woman without leaving his tunic. That young man who followed Jesus wrapped in a linen cloth, because he had been seized by the officers, casting away his earthly covering, escaped naked. Elijah, snatched to heaven in a chariot of fire, left his mantle on the earth. Elisha turned the oxen and the yoke of his former work into vows. The wisest of men speaks: He who touches pitch shall be defiled by it.

As long as we are engaged in the affairs of the world and our soul is bound fast by the management of possessions and revenues, we cannot think freely of God. For what fellowship has righteousness with iniquity, or what communion has light with darkness? What concord has Christ with Belial? What part has a believer with an unbeliever? You cannot, says the Lord, serve God and mammon. To lay down gold belongs to beginners, not to the perfect. This Crates the Theban did, this Antisthenes did. But to offer oneself to God belongs properly to Christians and to the apostles, who, together with the widow of her poverty casting their coins into the treasury, handed over to the Lord the whole substance they had possessed, and deserve to hear:

You shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. These things you yourself understand in what spirit I unfold them, and how under other words I invite you to the dwelling-place of the holy places. Your abundance has supported the want of many, that the riches of these also might overflow into your need. You have made yourself friends of the unrighteous mammon, who may receive you into the eternal tabernacles. A thing to be praised, and to be set on a level with the virtues of apostolic times, when the believers, having sold their possessions, brought their moneys and poured them out before the feet of the apostles, showing that avarice is to be trodden underfoot. But the Lord seeks rather the souls of believers than their wealth. We read: The redemption of a man's soul is his own riches.

We can indeed understand this of one's own riches, which are not from another's goods, not from robberies, according to that saying: Honour the Lord out of your own just labours; but better is that interpretation, that by our own riches we should understand the hidden treasures which neither the thief can dig out nor the violent robber snatch away. My little works, which you say you desire — not by their own merit, but through your kindness — I gave to your men to be copied, and I saw them copied in paper codices, and I frequently admonished that they should compare them more diligently and correct them.

For I myself, on account of the frequency of those coming and going and the throngs of pilgrims, could not re-read such large volumes, and — as they themselves who were present can testify — being detained by a long illness, I scarcely began to draw breath in the days of Lent, on which they were setting out. Whence, if you should find errors of writing, or some things are copied incorrectly which hinder the reader's sense, you ought not to impute it to me, but to your own men and to the inexperience of the notaries and copyists and their carelessness, who write not what they find but what they understand, and, while they strive to correct the errors of others, betray their own.

Moreover, a false rumour has brought to you that the books of Josephus and the volumes of the holy Papias and Polycarp were translated by me, whereas I have neither the leisure nor the strength to render such great works into another tongue with the same grace. Of Origen and Didymus I have translated a few volumes, wishing to show my countrymen in part what Greek learning retained. The canon of the Hebrew verity — except for the Octateuch, which I now have in hand — I gave to your boys and notaries to be copied; the edition of the Seventy translators I do not doubt that you too possess, and many years ago, most diligently corrected, I delivered it to the studious. The New Testament I have restored to the authority of the Greek.

For as the trustworthiness of the old books must be tested from the Hebrew volumes, so the New requires the standard of the Greek tongue. As to what you ask concerning the Sabbath, whether one should fast, and concerning the Eucharist, whether it should be received daily — as the Roman church and those of Spain are reported to observe — Hippolytus indeed, a most eloquent man, has written on it, and various authors in scattered passages have published different things in various works; but I think you should be briefly admonished of this, that ecclesiastical traditions — especially those which do not stand against the faith — are to be observed as they were handed down by our elders, and that the custom of some is not to be overthrown by the contrary usage of others.

And would that we could fast at all times, as we read that the apostle Paul and the believers with him did on the days of Pentecost and on the Lord's Day — nor are they on that account to be accused of the Manichaean heresy, since carnal food ought not to be preferred to the spiritual — and that we could also receive the Eucharist at all times without condemnation of ourselves and a pricking conscience, and hear the psalmist saying: Taste and see how sweet is the Lord, and sing with him: My heart has uttered a good word! Nor do I say this in the sense that I think one should fast on feast days and take away the festival seasons woven together through fifty days; but let each province abound in its own sense and reckon the precepts of the elders to be apostolic laws.

Two little cloaks and a shaggy garment from your own use, either to be used or to be given to the saints, I have received. I have sent to you and to your sister the insignia of poverty and the tokens of daily penitence: four little haircloths suited to your purpose and to your uses, and a codex — that is, the very obscure visions of Isaiah, which I recently expounded with a historical explanation — so that as often as you look upon my little works, so often, mindful of your most sweet friend, you may make ready the voyage which for a little while you had put off.

And because a man's way is not in himself, and the steps of a man are directed by the Lord, if perchance — which be far off — anything should prove a hindrance, I beg that those whom charity joins, the length of lands may not separate, and that we may always feel our absent Lucinus present through the exchange of letters. LETTER 72. TO VITALIS THE PRESBYTER. Zeno the shipmaster, through whom you say the letters of your holiness were transmitted to me, delivered only one, and that a brief epistle of the blessed pope Amabilis, containing the customary little gifts. And I sufficiently wonder what the cause was that, while he proved faithful in conveying the blessings both of yours and of his, he is shown negligent in delivering the letter.

For I do not think that you, a disciple of the truth, are deceived, unless perhaps a Latin discourse strayed among the papers of a Greek. And so I write in reply to the second letter, which my holy son the deacon Heraclius delivered to me, in which, among other things, you entreat that I should set forth for you the reasons why Solomon and Ahaz are said to have begotten sons at eleven years of age. For if in his twelfth year Solomon received the rule over Israel and reigned forty years in Jerusalem, and his son Rehoboam, when he was in his forty-first year of age, succeeded his father in the kingdom, it is evident that Solomon was eleven years old, or ten, since a mother claims ten months for herself from conception to birth.

Again Ahaz, son of Jotham, when he was twenty years old, was set as king over the two tribes, that is, Judah and Benjamin, and reigned sixteen years; and when he died, Hezekiah, being in his twenty-fifth year of age, succeeded his father in the kingdom. From which it is understood that Ahaz too begot his son Hezekiah in his eleventh or tenth year. And if indeed in these histories the Seventy translators held one thing and the Hebrew verity another, we could take refuge in our accustomed defences and hold the citadel of our native tongue; but now, since the authentic text itself and the other translators agree with equal authority, the difficulty is not in the Scripture but in the sense.

Who among mortals would believe that a boy of eleven years should beget a son? Many other things too are said in the Scriptures which seem incredible and yet are true. For nature has no power against the Lord of nature — nor can the vessel say to the potter: Why have you made me thus, or thus? — although what is done as a miracle, a sign, and a portent cannot make a law of nature. Because in our own age a double man was born at Lydda, with two heads, four hands, one belly and two feet, is it therefore necessary that all men should be born thus? Let us read the old histories, and especially the Greek and Latin, and we shall find that, according to ancient error, monstrous offspring, both in men and in herds and flocks, were expiated by lustral victims.

I have heard — the Lord being my witness, I do not lie — that a certain poor woman, when she was nursing a foundling child, and dropping food into its mouth and performing a nurse's office, and the little one, who reached his tenth year, was lying with her, it happened that she gorged herself with more wine than modesty allows, and, inflamed with lust, taught the infant intercourse by obscene motions. The first drunkenness of one night, and of the rest thereafter, made it a habit. Not yet had two months rolled by, and behold, the woman's womb swelled. What more? By the dispensation of God it came to pass that she who, against nature, was abusing the simplicity of a little one in contempt of God, was betrayed by the Lord of nature, that word being fulfilled which says: There is nothing hidden which shall not be made manifest.

And at the same time let us consider that the Scripture covertly accuses both Solomon and Ahaz of sensuality and impiety. For each of them, though he was of the stock of David, departed from the Lord.

And the one followed lust to such a degree that he had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and young girls and common harlots beyond number; and, having neglected the God of his fathers, he built up the idols of very many nations, and became not, as before, Jedidiah — that is, beloved of the Lord — but a lover of women. The other sent to the king of the Assyrians, seeking help, and in the time of his distress increased his contempt against the Lord: he sacrificed victims to the gods of Damascus, to those who had smitten him, and in all the cities of Judah he built altars for burning incense, and provoked to wrath the Lord God of his fathers to such a degree that, having plundered and broken the vessels of the house of God, he shut the doors of the temple of God and made for himself altars in all the corners of Jerusalem, and walked in the ways of the kings of Israel, and cast statues of the Baalim, and burned incense in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, and passed his sons through the fire according to the rite of the nations whom the Lord slew at the coming of the sons of Israel.

From which it is evident that men given over to lust from an early age are shown by their premature offspring to have begun to sin even at that time at which nature does not permit. To sum up, this may be said: that in the reign of David, Solomon, when he was twelve years old, obtained his father's throne, and afterward — because the Scripture has left it uncertain — David lived on for several years while his son already reigned, years which are to be imputed to him and not to Solomon; but when his father was dead, the son thereafter reigned forty years, which he reigned without his parent; and thus both the beginning of Solomon's reign and the time during which he alone reigned are demonstrated by the history, yet all the years of his life are not contained within a span of only fifty-two years.

But if you doubt that, when sons reign while their fathers are still living, the time of their reign is imputed not to the sons but to the parents, read the very book of Kingdoms, and you will find that Uzziah, king of Judah, after he was smitten with leprosy, dwelt in a separate house, and his son Jotham held the rule and judged the people of the land until the day of his father's death; and yet, after his father's death, when he was twenty-five years old, he is said to have reigned sixteen years — namely, the years he reigned alone. What we have understood of Solomon must be understood likewise of Ahaz, who was the son of Jotham and the father of Hezekiah.

I have heard a certain Hebrew relate a story of this kind, in accordance with the prophecy of Isaiah, which I recently interpreted among the ten visions: that when Ahaz died, Philistia rejoiced, and the Scripture afterward threatens and says: Rejoice not, all you Philistia, because the rod of him that smote you is broken in pieces. For out of the root of the serpent shall come forth a basilisk, and its seed shall swallow up the bird — that is: out of Ahaz, Hezekiah is established as king. From which he wished it to be understood that not immediately after his father's death was the son substituted to the rule, but that either by seditions of the people, or by certain interregnums, or at any rate by pressing evils and by wars rising up on this side and that, his reign was deferred.

In obscure matters we set forth various opinions, so that we may seem not so much to be writing to you as speaking with you face to face. For the rest, when the Apostle forbids endless genealogies and Jewish fables, he seems to me to be prohibiting questions of this very kind. For what profit is there in clinging to the letter and in cavilling either at a copyist's error or at the sequence of the years, when it is written most plainly: 'The letter kills, but the spirit gives life'? Read through all the books of both the Old and the New Testament, and you will find such a discord in the number of years and such confusion between Judah and Israel, that is, between the two kingdoms, that to give oneself over to questions of this sort seems the mark not so much of a studious as of an idle man.

I gladly received the little gifts you sent, and I earnestly pray that you may persevere to the very end in the love with which you have begun to seek us out. For it is virtue not to have begun, but to have persevered. Receive in turn what we have sent by Desiderius. LETTER 73. TO THE PRESBYTER EVANGELUS, CONCERNING MELCHIZEDEK. You have sent me an anonymous volume, and I do not know whether you removed the author's name from the title, or whether he who wrote it, to escape the peril of disputation, was unwilling to acknowledge himself as author. When I had read it, I understood that the most famous question concerning the high priest Melchizedek had there been carried, by many arguments, to the point that its author tried to teach that he who blessed so great a patriarch was of a more divine nature and not to be reckoned among men.