Letters (CSEL) 1 part 60/85

Peter too had one, and yet he forsook her with his net and his little boat. The most provident Lord, desiring the salvation of all and preferring the penitence of a sinner to his death, took from you even this excuse, so that she should not drag you down to earthly things, but that you should follow her as she journeys toward the kingdoms of paradise. Gladly do you prepare good things — those who have gone before you to the Lord — so that their portions may not increase a sister's riches, but go to the redemption of your soul and the nourishment of the wretched. These jewels your daughters ask of you; with these gems they desire to be adorned. Their own heads they wish. What was to perish in silk, let it be kept in the cheap tunics of the poor.

They demand back their portions from you; joined to their Bridegroom, they do not wish to seem poor and ignoble; they desire their own ornaments. Nor is there any reason for you to excuse yourself by your nobility and the weight of your riches. Look to the holy man Pammachius and to the presbyter Paulinus of most fervent faith, who offered to the Lord not only their riches but their very selves, who, against the devil's shuffling evasion, by no means gave skin for skin, but consecrated their flesh and bones and souls to the Lord — who by both example and eloquence, that is, by both deed and tongue, are able to bring you on to greater things. You are noble: so are they, but nobler in Christ. Rich and honored:

so are they — nay, from rich and illustrious they became poor and inglorious, and therefore the richer and more illustrious, because for Christ's sake poor and dishonored. And you indeed do well in that you are said to minister to the saints' needs, to cherish monks, to offer very much to the churches; but these are but the rudiments of your soldiery. You despise gold: many philosophers too have despised it — one of whom, to be silent about the rest, flung the price of his many possessions into the sea, saying: 'Go into the deep, ye evil desires; I will drown you, lest I myself be drowned by you.' A philosopher, that creature of glory and cheap slave of popular breath, laid down his whole burden at once; and do you reckon yourself set upon the summit of the virtues, if you offer a part out of the whole?

The Lord wants you yourself as a living victim, pleasing to God — you, I say, not your possessions. And therefore He admonishes you with various temptations, because Israel is instructed by many blows and sorrows, and 'whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.' The poor widow cast two mites into the treasury, and, because she offered the whole of what she had, she is said to have surpassed all the wealthy in the offering of God's gifts — which are weighed not by their own weight, but by the will of those who offer. Though you have paid out your income to many, though certain ones rejoice in your liberality, yet far more are those to whom you have given nothing; for not even the wealth of Darius and Croesus can satisfy the poor of the world.

But if you give your very self to the Lord and, made perfect with apostolic virtue, begin to follow the Savior, then you will understand where you have been, and how lowly a place you have held in Christ's army. Have you not mourned your dead daughters, and were not the paternal tears upon your cheeks dried by the fear of Christ? How much greater was Abraham, who slew his only son by his own will, and did not despair that he whom he had heard was to be the heir of the world would live again even after death! Jephthah offered his virgin daughter, and for that reason is placed by the Apostle in the enumeration of the saints.

I do not wish you to offer to the Lord only those things which a thief can snatch, an enemy invade, a proscription carry off — things which can both come and go, and, like waves and billows, are seized by masters who succeed one another, and, to comprehend all in one word, which willy-nilly you will leave behind at death. Offer that which no enemy can take from you, no tyranny wrest away, which goes with you to the world below — nay, to the kingdoms of heaven and to the delights of paradise. You build monasteries; a great number of the saints is maintained by you throughout the islands you love; but you would do better if you yourself lived as a saint among the saints. 'Be ye holy, for I am holy,' says the Lord.

The apostles glory that they left all and followed the Savior; and truly, except for nets and a boat, we read that they left nothing, and yet by the testimony of the future Judge they are crowned, because in offering themselves they had left all that they had. These things I say not in disparagement of your works, nor that I may make light of your liberality and your alms, but because I would not have you a monk among the worldly and a worldling among the monks, and I demand you wholly, whose mind I hear is given over to divine worship.

If any friend or follower or kinsman resists this counsel of ours and calls you back to the delights of a splendid table, understand that he is thinking not of your soul, but of his own belly, and that all riches and sumptuous banquets are ended by a sudden death. Within twenty days you lost two daughters of eight and six years — and do you suppose an old man can live long? Even that his life may be prolonged, David will hear: 'The days of our life are seventy years; but if more, eighty, and whatever is beyond is labor and sorrow.' Happy, and worthy of all blessedness, is he whom old age overtakes serving Christ, whom the last day finds soldiering for the Savior — who will not be confounded when he speaks with his enemies in the gate, to whom at the entrance of paradise it will be said:

'Thou didst receive thy evil things in thy life; but now here be glad.' For the Lord will not take vengeance twice for the same thing. The purple-clad rich man the flame of Gehenna received; Lazarus, poor and full of sores, whose putrid flesh the dogs licked, and who scarcely sustained his wretched soul on the crumbs of the wealthy man's table, is received into the bosom of Abraham and rejoices with so great a patriarch for a father. It is difficult — nay, impossible — that anyone should enjoy both present and future goods, that he should fill both his belly here and his mind there, that he should pass from delights to delights, that he should be first in both worlds, that he should appear glorious both on earth and in heaven.

But if a silent thought stirs up a scruple in you — why the admonisher himself is not such as I desire you to be, and you have seen some fall midway on the road — I will answer briefly this: that the things I say are not mine, but the Lord and Savior's; that I admonish not what I myself can do, but what he ought to will or do who is to be Christ's servant. Even athletes are stronger than their trainers, and yet the weaker one gives the counsel while the stronger fights. Do not look to Judas who denied, but look to Paul who confessed. Jacob, the son of a most wealthy father, alone and naked, journeys to Mesopotamia with his staff, lies weary from the road, and he who had been most delicately reared by his mother Rebecca uses a stone at his head for a pillow.

He saw a ladder reaching from earth even to heaven, and angels ascending and descending by it, and the Lord leaning above it, to stretch out His hand to the weary, and to summon those who ascend to their labor by His gaze. Hence that very place is called Bethel, that is, 'the house of God,' in which there is daily ascending and descending. For even the saints fall, if they are negligent, and sinners recover their former rank, if they wash away their filth with weeping. This I say, therefore, that those descending may not terrify you, but those ascending may provoke you. An example is never taken from the wicked; even in the affairs of the world the incitements to virtue are always from the better part.

Forgetful of my purpose and of epistolary brevity, I was longing to dictate more — for to the dignity of the matter and to the merit of your person, all that is said is too little — and lo, our Ausonius began to demand the little sheets, to press the scribes, and, with the neighing of his eager horse, to reproach in his haste the slowness of my poor little talent. Remember me therefore, and take care that you fare well in Christ, and — to be silent about the rest — imitate the domestic example of holy Vera, who, having truly followed Christ, endures the hardship of pilgrimage; and let a woman be to you the leader of so great a deed. Letter 119. To Minervius and Alexander, on a Most Difficult Question of the Apostle Paul.

At the very point of the departure of our brother Sisinnius, who had brought me your writings, I am compelled to dictate these lines, such as they are. Nor can I conceal from your prudence, and I beseech you to refer this saying to glory — nay rather, to full intimacy, since I speak to you as to myself: he has brought to me many questions of the holy brothers and sisters of your province, to which I had thought to respond within a most ample span of time, up to the day of Epiphany. And when in the stolen little vigils of the nights I was dictating answers to very many, and, the others finished, was reserving myself for yours as for the most difficult, suddenly he arrived, declaring that he would set out at once.

And when I begged him to postpone his journey, he began to set before me the famine of Libya, the pressing needs of the monasteries of Egypt, the waters of the Nile not at their full flood, the hunger of many — so that it was almost an offense against the Lord to wish to detain that man any longer. And so I have sent you, finished, the weft and the warp and the threads and the webs which I had prepared for a tunic of my own, that whatever is lacking in me may be woven up by your eloquence. You are prudent and learned men, and from that 'dog-like' eloquence, as Appius calls it, you have passed over to the eloquence of Christ. Nor do I need great labor with you; that which the fables relate a certain philosopher suffered while trying to persuade a rustic: 'Scarcely,' he said, 'had I spoken half, when already he had understood.'

And so I too, being pressed for time, have set forth for you the opinions of those individuals who have left brief commentaries on Sacred Scripture, and have translated most passages word for word, so that I may both free myself from the question and transmit to you the authority of the ancient expositors, so that in reading and weighing each point you may rest not upon my own will but upon your own judgment. You ask in what sense it was said, and how in the first Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians it should be read: 'We shall indeed all sleep, but we shall not all be changed'; or, according to certain copies, 'We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed' — for both readings are found in the Greek codices.

Concerning this, Theodore of Heraclea — the city once called Perinthus — spoke thus in his brief commentaries on the Apostle: 'We shall indeed not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. For Enoch and Elijah, having overcome the necessity of death, were translated just as they were, in their bodies, from earthly conversation to the heavenly kingdoms. Whence also the saints who at the day of consummation and judgment shall be found in their bodies, together with other saints who shall rise from the dead, shall be caught up in the clouds to meet Christ in the air; and they shall not taste death, and they shall be forever with the Lord, the most grievous necessity of death being trodden underfoot. Whence the Apostle says: We shall indeed not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.'

'For those who shall rise from the dead and, living, shall be caught up in the clouds, shall pass over to incorruption and shall exchange mortality for immortality — not in time, not even in a brief interval, but in an atom and in a point of time and in a moment, in the space in which the eyelid of the eye can move, at the last trumpet. For with such swiftness shall the resurrection of the dead take place, that the living, whom the time of consummation shall find in their bodies, cannot outstrip the dead who rise from the depths below. This Paul explains more clearly, saying: For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed.'

'For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality, that they may be able to remain forever in one of the two portions — either in punishments or in the kingdom of heaven.' Diodore, bishop of Tarsus, passing over this chapter, briefly noted in what follows, on that which is written: 'And the dead shall rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed.' 'If,' he says, 'the dead shall rise incorruptible, there is no doubt that they too are changed for the better. What need was there to say: And we shall be changed?'

'Did he perhaps wish it to be understood in this way — that incorruption is common to all, but transformation belongs properly to the righteous, since they attain not only incorruption and immortality but also glory?' Apollinaris, though in other words, asserted the same as Theodore: that certain ones will not die but will be caught up from the present life into the life to come, so that with bodies changed and glorified they may be with Christ — which we now believe concerning Enoch and Elijah. Didymus, crossing over into the opinion of Origen not with his feet but with his words, proceeds by the opposite road: 'Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall indeed all sleep, but we shall not all be changed.' Which he expounded thus:

'If the resurrection did not need an interpreter, nor had obscurity in its meaning, Paul the Apostle would never, after the many things he spoke concerning the resurrection, have added: Behold, I tell you a mystery: we shall indeed all sleep — that is, we shall die — but we shall not all — but only the saints — be changed. I know that in some copies it is written: Not indeed all, but we shall all be changed; but it must be considered whether what is set first, We shall all be changed, can agree with what follows: The dead shall rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed. If all are to be changed, and this is common with the rest, it was superfluous to say And we shall be changed. Wherefore it is to be read thus: We shall indeed all sleep, but we shall not all be changed.'

'For if all die in Adam, and in death there is a sleeping, then we shall all sleep or die. But according to the idiom of the Scriptures, he sleeps who has died in hope of the future resurrection. And everyone who sleeps will surely awake, provided that a sudden violence of death has not overwhelmed him and death has been joined to sleep. And when all have thus slept by the law of nature, the saints alone shall be changed for the better both in body and in soul, so that incorruption belongs to all who rise, but glory and transformation to all the saints.' And what follows, according to the Greek — en atomō, en rhipē or rhipē ophthalmou — for both are read, and our translators have rendered it 'in a moment' and 'in the twinkling' or 'in the movement of an eye' — he explained thus:

'The present passage signifies the resurrection of all joined together at once.' For when he says, 'in a point of time and in the movement of an eye and in a moment,' by the future resurrection of all he excludes the whole fable of a first and a second resurrection, whereby some are believed to be the first and others the last to rise. Now an atom is a point of time which cannot be cut or divided; whence Epicurus too builds his world out of his atoms and forms all things. And the twinkling of an eye, or its movement, which in Greek is called rhopē, passes by with such speed that it almost escapes the perception of the one who sees.

But since in most copies, instead of rhopē — that is, a twinkling or movement — rhipē is read, we ought to understand this: that just as a light feather or a straw or a thin, dry leaf is snatched up by the wind and its blast and carried from the earth on high, so at the twinkling or movement of God the bodies of all the dead shall be moved, made ready for the coming of the Judge. And what he joins and says: at the last trumpet; for it shall sound, and the dead shall rise incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality — this has a twofold understanding: that the clangor of the trumpet indicates either the magnitude of the voice, according to that which is written:

Lift up your voice like a trumpet; or the open resurrection of all, according to that which we read in the Gospel: But you, when you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you — that is: do your mercy secretly and in hiding, lest you seem to glory in another's misery. But we ask why he wrote that the dead will rise at the last trumpet. For when it is called the last, surely others have gone before. In the Apocalypse of John, seven angels are described with trumpets, and as each one sounds — namely the first, the second, and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth — it is indicated what was done through each.

But at the last, that is the seventh, when the clear blast of the trumpet resounds, the dead are raised up, their bodies which before had been corruptible now receiving incorruption. Whence, after the last trumpet, the Apostle sets forth what follows: For it shall sound, and the dead shall rise incorruptible, but we shall be changed. When he says 'we,' he signifies that another — himself and those who are with him — is meant, apart from the dead. To understand this, there are those who say that the dead, who rise incorruptible, are the bodies of the dead, but that those who are said to be changed ought to be understood as the souls, when they shall have been changed into a greater glory and shall have attained to the perfect man, to the measure of the fullness of the age of Christ.

But others assert that by 'the dead' are to be understood sinners, who rise incorruptible so that they may be able to endure eternal torments; but that those who are changed are the saints, who are carried from virtue to virtue and from glory to glory. Whence, concerning the incorruption of the dead, he added: For this corruptible must put on incorruption. But to that which he had said, We shall be changed, he joined this: And this mortal must put on immortality. For immortality is one thing, incorruption another, just as the mortal is one thing and the corruptible another. Now whatever is mortal is also corruptible, but not everything that is corruptible is at once also mortal.

For corruptible are bodies which lack a soul, and yet they are not mortal, because they never had life, which properly belongs to living creatures. Whence the Apostle pointedly joined incorruption to corruption, and immortality to mortality, at the time of the future resurrection.' Acacius — bishop of Caesarea, which was formerly called Straton's Tower, successor to Eusebius of Pamphilus — in the fourth book of his Miscellaneous Questions, proposing to himself this same question, disputed it more broadly, and taking up both readings, which seem to be contrary to each other, after a beginning which we have omitted, spoke thus: 'Let us first speak of that which is more generally found in most copies: Behold, I tell you a mystery:

We shall indeed all sleep, but we shall not all be changed. He called it a mystery in order to make his hearers more attentive, being about to discourse more fully on the resurrection. Now the sleeping signifies that death which is common to all. Whence most rightly he set it down that we all sleep, that is, die, just as he had said above: As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive. Therefore, since all are going to die, hear the sacred things which I say: We shall indeed all die, but we shall not all be changed. For the trumpet shall sound — there is no doubt that it is the seventh angel — and the dead shall rise incorruptible. But if the dead shall be incorruptible, how shall they not be changed, since incorruption itself is a change?

But here the transformation, by which Paul and the saints are to be changed, is understood as glorification. But incorruption is common to all for this reason: that in it the sinners shall be more wretched, so that they may be everlasting unto torments and not be dissolved along with a mortal and corruptible body. We read in the same Epistle, where the Apostle discourses on the sacred diversity of the resurrection — not in the nature of the bodies, but in the variety of glory — while some rise to perpetual punishments, others to everlasting glory: But there is one flesh of birds, another of fishes, another of beasts, and there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. So, he says, shall also be the resurrection of the dead.

To which opinion the Church rather assents: that we all die by a common death, and not all are changed into glory, according to that which Daniel writes: Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall rise, some to eternal life, others to confusion and everlasting reproach. For those who shall rise to confusion and everlasting reproach shall not rise to eternal glory, in which Paul and those who are with him shall be changed. Since these things are so, and thus have been understood by us — that only those who rise to glory undergo transformation, but that of sinners and unbelievers, who are called dead and rise incorruptible, there is by no means a transformation, but perpetual punishments to be spoken of.

Let us pass to the second reading, which is thus given in most copies: We shall not indeed all sleep, but we shall all be changed. From which some assert that many will be found alive in their bodies, and that if not all sleep, not all shall die; and if not all die, not all shall rise. For strictly speaking, he is said to rise who first fell by dying. Whence they also hold that Paul writes in the first Epistle to the Thessalonians:

We who live, who remain until the coming of the Lord, shall not go before those who sleep; for the Lord himself, at the command, at the voice of the archangel, at the trumpet of God, shall descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we who live, who remain, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord. And from these sayings they try to prove that Paul, and those who were writing the epistle with him, supposed that they would not die, but would be found in the body on the day of consummation. But if this be true, Paul erred and was deceived by a human estimation, in thinking that he would be found in the body — which the outcome of events proved false.

This also the Thessalonians themselves had understood, not knowing the sacred things of the mystic discourse, and they wavered with various conjectures and said: 'If Paul is to be found in the body, the day of judgment is near.' Whence he corrects them, writing a second epistle: We beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together unto him, that you be not soon shaken in mind, nor be terrified, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by epistle as though from us, as if the day of the Lord were at hand.

Let no one deceive you by any means; for that day shall not come unless the falling away come first, and the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped, so that he sits in the temple of God, showing himself as though he were God. Do you not remember that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? By which words he does this: that he may call them back from error, lest they think the day of judgment approaches, and lest what he had written — We who live, who remain until the coming of the Lord, shall not go before those who have slept — they understand otherwise than he himself who wrote it wished it to be understood. For it cannot be that one who had written to Timothy:

I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my dissolution is at hand — think that he would remain forever in the flesh and never die, and would pass at once from earthly life to the heavenly kingdoms; especially since, writing to the Romans, he said the same thing: Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? and to the Corinthians: While we dwell in the body, we are absent from the Lord. But we would rather go out of the body and be with the Lord. He who said these things surely knew that he was going to die. It is better, therefore, to understand spiritually what is written, and to take the sleeping in the present passage not as the death through which the soul is separated from the body, but as sin after faith and offense against God, and a sleeping after baptism — of which also he spoke to the Corinthians:

For this cause many among you are weak and sickly, and many sleep. And in another place: Then also those who have slept in Christ have perished — who, though they are dead, shall not perish by a perpetual death, because they are not held by a mortal crime, but by a light and slight sin. This too another saint, desiring to avoid it, spoke of: Lest perhaps I sleep in death. For there is a sleep of sin which leads to death, and there is another sleeping of a fault which is not bound by death. He therefore who has lived by that life which says, 'I am the life' — for indeed

our life is hidden with Christ in God — and has never been separated from it, nor has sinned unto death, he is said to be of the living and of those who live forever, concerning whom the Savior also testifies in the mystical discourse of the Gospel of John: He who believes in me shall never die. Whence the Apostle also, treading in the footsteps of his Lord, taught the disciples those things which he had learned from his Master. And so, we shall not all sleep. For he who guards his heart with all vigilance and keeps watch for the precepts of Christ, and is mindful of his command who says, Watch, for you know not at what hour the thief will come — and in another place:

Give not sleep to your eyes, nor slumber to your eyelids, that you may be saved like a roe from the snares and like a bird from the nets — this man shall not sleep. Since, therefore, there are certain ones who do not sleep, who always live and keep watch in Christ, it follows that by no means do all sleep, and, on the contrary, that all are changed — not with the change of glory, which is properly owed to the saints, but with that change by which this corruptible is made incorruptible, so that it may receive either everlasting punishments or rewards. But even if someone has slept in Christ and has fallen asleep with the sleep of negligence, he ought to hear what is written: Shall not he who sleeps rise again?

But he who does not sleep, but keeps watch and always lives in Christ, shall pass from life to life or be caught up in the clouds, that he may be forever with the Lord. Of this manner of sleepers was Lazarus, of whom the Lord said: Lazarus, our friend, sleeps. And concerning this sleeper he said to Martha: He who believes in me, though he be dead, shall live; and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. For he who trusts in Christ with his whole mind, even if, as a man, he has fallen and died in sin, yet by his faith he lives forever. Otherwise this common death is owed equally to believers and unbelievers, and all alike are going to rise, some to eternal confusion, others, because they believe, to everlasting life.