Letters (CSEL) 1 part 74/85

'Ask of me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance, and for thy possession the ends of the earth,' and more openly through Isaiah: 'It is a small thing that thou shouldst be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to gather the dregs—or remnants—of Israel. I have given thee for a light to all the nations, that thou mayest be the salvation of the whole earth.' From this it is plainly demonstrated that all the things of that people went before in image and shadow and type, but were written for us, upon whom the ends of the ages have come. Many crimes, O Jew, hast thou committed; thou hast served all the nations round about. Because of what deed? Surely because of idolatry.

And when you repeatedly served in bondage, God had mercy on you and sent judges and saviours, who delivered you from the servitude of the Moabites and Ammonites, and also of the Philistines and of various nations. Most recently, under the kings, you offended God, and the whole province was destroyed by the Babylonian devastation, and for seventy years it remained a wilderness. By Cyrus, king of the Persians, the captivity was released—Ezra and Nehemiah relate this most fully—the temple was rebuilt under Darius, king of the Persians and Medes, by Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, and Jeshua, son of Jozadak, the high priest.

What you suffered from the Medes, Egyptians, and Macedonians, I will not enumerate, nor will I bring back to your memory Antiochus Epiphanes, cruelest of all tyrants, nor will I recount Gnaeus Pompeius, Gabinius, Scaurus, Varus, Cassius, and Sosius, who insulted your cities and especially Jerusalem. Finally, under Vespasian and Titus, the city was captured and the temple overthrown. Then the ruins of the city remained for fifty years, until the emperor Hadrian. After the overthrow of the temple, for a little less than four hundred years the ruins of both the city and the temple have remained. Because of what great crime? Surely you do not worship idols; but even while serving the Persians and Romans and pressed by the yoke of captivity, you know not foreign gods.

How is it that the most merciful God, who has never forgotten you, is now, through such great spans of time, not moved by your miseries to loose the captivity—or, to speak more truly, to send you the awaited antichrist? Because of what crime, I say, and so execrable a wickedness, has He turned away His eyes? Do you not know? Remember the voice of your fathers: 'His blood be upon us and upon our children,' and, 'Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be ours,' and, 'We have no king but Caesar.' You have what you chose: until the end of the world you shall be a servant to Caesar, until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in, and so all Israel shall be saved—so that he who was once the head is turned into the tail.

These things, most learned man—now, after passing through the honour of a double prefecture, more honoured in Christ—I have dictated to you in a hurried and brief night's labour, lest I should seem to be wholly silent. For at the same time, indeed on the same day, both your letter was delivered to me and mine dispatched, so that I had either to be silent or to reply in unpolished speech—the one belonging to shame, the other to charity. LETTER 130. TO DEMETRIAS. Among all the subjects which from my youth up to this present age I have written, whether by my own hand or by that of secretaries, nothing is more difficult than the present work. For being about to write to Demetrias, a virgin of Christ, who is first in nobility and riches in the Roman world, if I say all things fitting to her virtues,

I shall be thought to flatter; if I withhold some things, lest they seem incredible, my modesty will do harm to her praises. What then shall I do? What I cannot fulfil, I dare not refuse: so great is the authority of her grandmother and mother, distinguished women, in commanding, their trust in requesting, their perseverance in extorting.

For they demand of me nothing as something new and extraordinary, whose talent has often been worn down in subjects of this kind, but only that the testimony of my voice may not, so far as in me lies, be lacking in setting forth the virtues of her, whose—to use the saying of a renowned orator—hope is more to be praised than the reality, although she has surpassed her girlish years by the ardour of her faith, and has begun where for others to have left off is the mark of perfect and consummated virtue. Away with detraction, let envy be gone, let there be no crime in ambition. As strangers we write to a stranger—at least as regards the outward appearance of the body; otherwise the inner man is beautifully known to itself by that acquaintance whereby the Apostle Paul too knew the Colossians and many of the believers whom he had not before seen.

How great is the merit—nay, the miracle—of our virgin in my eyes, may be estimated from this: that while occupied in the exposition of the temple of Ezekiel—a work which is the most difficult of all in the holy Scriptures—and in that part of the shrine where the holy of holies and the altar of incense are described, I preferred to use this little digression for a while, to pass from altar to altar, and to consecrate a living victim, pleasing to God and without any stain, of eternal chastity. I know that at the imprecation of the pontiff the holy bridal veil covered the virgin's head, and that this well-known distinction of the apostolic voice was celebrated:

'I wish to present you all as a chaste virgin to Christ,' when 'the queen stood at his right hand in gilded raiment, surrounded with variety.' With this many-coloured garment, woven of the diversity of many virtues, Joseph too was clothed, and the daughters of kings of old made use of it. Whence the bride herself rejoices and says, 'The king has brought me into his chamber,' and the chorus of her companions answered, 'All the glory of the king's daughter is within.' But our prayer too will give some profit. The running of horses is made swifter by cheering; the strength of boxers is spurred on by shouts; the ranks drawn up for battle and the drawn swords are kindled by the commander's speech:

So in the present work the grandmother and mother have indeed planted, but we too shall water, and the Lord will give the increase. It is the discipline of the rhetoricians to adorn him whom you praise with great-grandfathers and forefathers and all his ancestral nobility, so that a fruitful root may compensate for the barrenness of the branches, and what you cannot hold in the fruit, you may admire in the trunk. No doubt now I must recall the famous names of the Probi and the Olybrii, and the illustrious line of the Anician blood, in which there is none, or scarcely any, who has not earned the consulship; or I must bring forward Olybrius, the father of our virgin, whom Rome lamented as snatched away by an untimely death. I am afraid to say more, lest I exasperate the wound of the holy mother, and the recollection of his virtues become a renewal of her grief.

A dutiful son, a lovable man, a merciful lord, an affable citizen, a consul indeed in boyhood, but by the goodness of his character a more illustrious senator. Happy in his death, who did not see his fatherland falling; nay, happier in his offspring, who made the nobility of Demetrias the great-grandmother more distinguished by the perpetual chastity of Demetrias the daughter. But what am I doing? Forgetful of my purpose, while I admire the young man, I have praised some of the goods of this world, whereas in him our virgin is rather to be praised for this—that she despised all these things, that she thought of herself not as noble, not as pre-eminent in riches, but as a human being.

Incredible fortitude of soul, that amid gems and silk, amid throngs of eunuchs and maidens and the flattery and services of a bustling household and exquisite banquets which the abundance of a great house supplied, she sought the labour of fastings, the roughness of garments, the restraint of food. For she had read the words of the Lord who says, 'They who are clothed in soft raiment are in the houses of kings.' She marvelled at the manner of life of Elijah and John the Baptist, each of whom girded and mortified his loins with a leather belt—the latter is related to have come in the spirit and power of Elijah as the forerunner of the Lord, prophesying in his parent's womb, and praised before the day of judgement by the voice of the Judge.

She admired the ardour of Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, who by prayers and fastings served the Lord in the temple even to extreme old age. She desired the choir of the four virgin daughters of Philip, and longed to be one of them, who by their virginal chastity obtained the grace of prophecy. With these and suchlike thoughts she fed her soul, fearing nothing so much as to offend her grandmother and mother. And though she was stirred by their example, she was terrified by their wish and zeal—not that the holy purpose displeased them, but that, considering the greatness of the matter, they dared not to wish and desire it. The young recruit of Christ was aflame; she hated her adornment, and with Esther she spoke to the Lord:

'Thou knowest that I hate the token of my exaltation'—that is, the diadem which she used to wear as a queen—'and that I count it as great uncleanness, like the rag of a menstruous woman.' Holy and noble women who saw her, who knew her—whom a savage storm drove from the shore of Gaul through Africa to the dwelling of the holy places, as enemies—say that, with none but the virgins of God conscious, who were in the company of her mother and grandmother, by night and in secret, she never used linen, never the softness of feathers, but had a little haircloth on the bare ground for her bed, and bathed her face with continual tears, prostrate on her knees with her mind on the Saviour, that she might obtain her purpose, that she might fulfil her desire, that she might soften the mind of her grandmother and mother. Why do I delay further?

When now the day of the wedding drew near, and the bridal chamber was being prepared for the future marriage, secretly and without witnesses, having the night for her solace, she is said to have armed herself with such counsels: 'What are you doing, Demetrias? Why do you defend your chastity with such great fear? There is need of liberty and boldness. You who are so afraid in peacetime, what would you do in enduring martyrdom? You who cannot bear the countenance of your own kin, how would you sustain the tribunals of persecutors? If the examples of men do not provoke you, let the blessed martyr Agnes exhort you and make you secure, who conquered both her age and the tyrant and crowned her title of chastity with martyrdom. You know not, wretched one, you know not to whom you owe your virginity.

Not long ago you trembled amid barbarian hands; you were covered by the bosom and mantle of your grandmother and mother; you saw yourself a captive, and your chastity not in your own power; you shuddered at the fierce faces of the enemy; with silent groaning you beheld the virgins of God carried off. Your city, once the head of the world, is the sepulchre of the Roman people; and will you yourself, an exile, on the Libyan shore receive an exiled husband? What bridesmaid will you have? With what retinue will you be led? The shrill screech of the Punic tongue will chant its wanton wedding-songs to you. Break off all delays! Perfect love casts out fear. Take up the shield of faith, the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation; go forth to battle. Chastity preserved also has its own martyrdom. Why do you fear your grandmother? Why do you dread your parent?

Perhaps they too may wish what they do not believe you wish.' Inflamed with these goads, she cast off all bodily adornment and worldly attire as hindrances to her purpose. Precious necklaces and pearls heavy with wealth and blazing gems are returned to their caskets; she is clothed in a cheap tunic, covered with a cheaper mantle, and unexpectedly she suddenly casts herself at her grandmother's knees, showing by tears alone and lamentations who she was. The holy and grave woman was astonished, beholding a strange attire upon her granddaughter; the mother stood thunderstruck with joy. Both, for very truth, could not believe what they desired to be true. The voice stuck in their throats, and amid blushing and paleness, fear and gladness, their varying thoughts kept changing.

I must yield at this point, nor will I attempt to narrate what by telling I would only diminish. To set forth the greatness of incredible joy, both the river of Tullian genius would run dry, and the wrought and quivering sentences of Demosthenes would move more slowly and languidly. Whatever the mind can conceive, whatever speech cannot unfold, we have heard was done at that time. Vying with one another, they rush to the kisses of granddaughter and daughter. They wept abundantly for joy, raised her with their hands as she lay, embraced her as she trembled, recognized in her purpose their own mind, and rejoiced that the virgin made a noble family nobler by her virginity—that she had found what would surpass her lineage, what would soothe the ashes of the city of Rome.

Good Jesus, what rejoicing there was in that whole household! As from a fruitful root many virgins sprouted up at once, and the throng of dependents and handmaids followed the example of their patroness and mistress. Throughout every house the profession of virginity was aglow; and though their condition in the flesh was unequal, the reward of chastity was one and the same. I say too little: all the churches throughout Africa exulted with a kind of festal dance. Not only to the cities, the towns, and the villages, but even to the very huts of the herdsmen did the renowned report make its way. All the islands between Africa and Italy were filled with this rumour, and with unimpeded step the joys ran yet farther abroad.

Then Italy laid aside her mourning garments, and the half-ruined walls of the city of Rome recovered in part their former splendour, judging that God was favourable to them in the accomplished conversion of their foster-child. You would have thought the band of Goths extinguished, and that the offscouring of deserters and slaves had fallen beneath the thunderbolt of the Lord who thunders from on high. Not so, after the Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae — places where thousands of Roman armies were slaughtered — did the Roman people first raise themselves up in the battle of Marcellus before Nola. With lesser joy in earlier days did the nobility, ransomed with gold, and the seed-plot of the Roman race in the citadel look upon the slain columns of the Gauls. This rumour reached the shores of the East, and in the inland cities too the triumph of Christian glory was heard.

What virgin of Christ has not boasted of fellowship with this one? What mother has not, O Juliana, called your womb blessed? Uncertain though among unbelievers may be the rewards of things to come — still, in the meantime, you have received more, O virgin, than you offered. Her whom only a single province knew as a man's betrothed, the whole world has heard of as a virgin of Christ. Wretched parents and Christians of imperfect faith are wont, because they cannot find worthy sons-in-law, to hand over to virginity daughters who are deformed or crippled in some limb — glass, as they say, being valued as highly as the pearl. Certainly those who think themselves more religious, after giving to their virgin daughters a small allowance scarcely sufficient for food, lavish all the rest of their estate upon their worldly children of either sex.

This is what recently in this city a certain wealthy priest did: he left his two daughters destitute in their vow of virginity, while providing his other children with every abundance for luxury and delights. Many women of our profession have done this — alas! — and would that the example were rare; but the more frequent it is, the happier are those women who have not followed even the example of the majority. It is reported, and celebrated with the praise of all Christians, that whatever had been prepared for a wedding was handed over by the holy Christian Synoris to a virgin, lest her Bridegroom should be wronged — nay rather, that she might come to her Bridegroom endowed with her former wealth, and that what in worldly things was destined to perish might sustain the need of God's household. Who would believe this?

That Proba — a name more illustrious than all dignities and than all the nobility in the Roman world, whose holiness and goodness poured out upon all was reverenced even among the barbarians; whom the ordinary consulships of her three children, Probinus, Olybrius, and Probus, did not weary, nor captivity within the city while its houses were burned and plundered — she is now said to be selling her ancestral possessions and making herself friends of the mammon of iniquity, that they may receive her into the eternal tabernacles; so that every grade of ecclesiastical ministry may blush, and the empty title of monks buy up estates while so great a nobility is the seller.

Scarcely had she escaped the hands of the barbarians and wept over the virgins torn from her embrace, when suddenly she was struck by an intolerable bereavement she had never feared — the loss of her most beloved son; and, as one destined to be the grandmother of a virgin of Christ, in the hope of things to come she received this deadly wound, proving true in her own case what is said in the lyric poem in praise of the just man: 'Though the whole world should collapse in ruins, the wreckage will strike him unafraid.' We read in the book of Job: 'While this one was yet speaking, there came another messenger'; and in the same book: 'Temptation' — or, as it is better rendered in the Hebrew, 'warfare' — 'is the life of man upon the earth.' For to this end we labour, and are imperilled in the warfare of this present world, that in the world to come we may be crowned.

Nor is it to be wondered at that this should be believed of human beings, since the Lord himself was tempted. And Scripture testifies of Abraham that God tempted him. For which cause the Apostle also says: 'rejoicing in tribulation,' and: 'knowing that tribulation works patience, and patience proof, and proof hope; and hope does not confound'; and in another place: 'Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? As it is written: For thy sake we are put to death all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.' And Isaiah exhorts men of this kind, saying:

'You who have been weaned from the milk, you who have been torn from the breast, look for tribulation upon tribulation, hope upon hope.' 'The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come, which shall be revealed in us.' Why I have rehearsed these things, the following discourse will show. She who from the midst of the sea had watched her homeland smoking, and had entrusted her safety and that of her own to a frail boat, found the shores of Africa yet more cruel.

For she was received by one of whom you would not know whether he was more greedy or more cruel, to whom nothing was sweet except wine and gain, and who, under cover of belonging to the party of a most merciful emperor, showed himself the most savage of all tyrants — and, to say something drawn from the fables of the poets, like Orcus in Tartarus he possessed a Cerberus not of three heads but of many, which dragged, tore, and destroyed all things. This man would carry off betrothed maidens from their mothers' bosoms, would sell the marriages of noble girls to traders and to the Syrians, the greediest of mortals, and would spare not the destitution of orphans, of widows, of virgins of Christ, watching the hands of petitioners rather than their faces.

Fleeing this wild beast, this Charybdis and this Scylla girt about with many dogs — one who would spare no shipwrecks and be bent by no captivities — the matron endured the barbarians. Imitate at least, cruel man, the enemy of the Roman empire. Brennus of our own age took only what he found; you seek what you do not find. And rivals marvel — for virtue always lies open to envy — why she purchased the chastity of so many by a silent proscription of her own, seeing that even that other man deigned to accept a part who could have carried off the whole, and she did not dare to refuse him, as it were her companion, understanding that she was, under the name of a private dignity, serving a tyrant. I feel that I lie open to the bites of my enemies, because I seem to flatter a most noble and most illustrious woman.

But they will not be able to accuse me, if they know that I have kept silent until now; for I never praised in her the antiquity of her lineage, nor the greatness of her riches and power, while her husband was living or dead — things which others perhaps may have praised in a hireling's oration. My purpose is with an ecclesiastical pen to praise the grandmother of my virgin, and to give thanks that she aided her granddaughter's will with her own. Otherwise the little cell of the monastery, the mean food and despised clothing, and an age now near to death, and a viaticum for so brief a span, are free from all the reproach of flattery.

Finally, in the remaining parts all my discourse shall be directed to the virgin — a virgin both noble, and noble no less in holiness than in birth, whose ascent is the loftier and whose fall therefore the more perilous. This one thing, O daughter born to God, I proclaim to you above all, and repeating it will admonish you again and again: that you occupy your mind with the love of sacred reading, and do not receive into the good ground of your breast the seed of darnel and wild oats, lest, while the father of the household sleeps — who is the νοῦς, that is the mind ever cleaving to God — the enemy man oversow tares; but that you may ever say: 'By night I sought him whom my soul loves.'

'Where do you feed, where do you lie down at noon?' And: 'My soul cleaved after you, your right hand upheld me.' And that saying of Jeremiah: 'I have not laboured in following you.' 'For there is no grief in Jacob, nor toil in Israel.' When you were in the world, you loved the things that were of the world: to polish the face with rouge and paint the cheeks with white lead, to adorn the hair and build up a towering coiffure with others' locks — to say nothing of the price of earrings, of the whiteness of pearls that attest the depths of the Red Sea, of the green of emeralds, of the flames of carbuncles, of the sea-blue of sapphires, for which the passions of matrons burn and rave. But now, since you have forsaken the world and by a second step after baptism have entered into a covenant with your adversary, saying to him:

'I renounce you, devil, and your world, and your pomp, and your works' — keep the covenant which you have struck, and be in agreement and keep the pact with your adversary while you are in the way of this world, lest perchance he hand you over to the judge and prove that you have usurped something of his, and you be handed over to the officer — who is himself the enemy and the avenger — and be cast into prison and into the outer darkness, which, the more we are separated from Christ the true light, the greater the horror with which it surrounds us; and you come not out thence until you pay the last farthing, that is, every least offence, since even for an idle word we shall render account in the day of judgment.

Let these things be said, not by any ill-omened prophecy against you, but by the office of a fearful and cautious monitor, who dreads for you even those things which are safe. 'If the spirit of one having power ascend upon you,' he says, 'leave not your place.' As though in readiness for battle and in the battle-line, we stand ever ready to fight. The enemy wishes to move us from our place and to make us give ground; but our footsteps must be made firm, and it must be said: 'He set my feet upon a rock,' and: 'The rock is a refuge for the conies' — for which many read 'hedgehogs,' a small and timid animal, weighed down by the thorns of sinners. But for this reason Jesus was crowned with thorns and bore our offences and grieved for us, that from the thorns and thistles of women — to whom it is said:

'In anxieties and pains shall you bring forth, O woman, and your turning shall be to your husband, and he shall have dominion over you' — from these there might spring the roses of virginity and the lilies of chastity. Whence also the Bridegroom feeds among the lilies and among those who have not defiled their garments — for they have remained virgins and have heard the precept: 'Let your garments be always white' — and as it were the author and prince of virginity he speaks confidently: 'I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valleys.' The rock, therefore, is a refuge for the conies, who in persecutions flee from city to city and do not fear that word of the prophet: 'Flight has perished from me.'

But the high mountains are for the stags, whose food are the snakes which the little child draws forth from the hole, when the leopard and the kid rest together, and the ox and the lion eat straw, so that the ox may in no wise learn ferocity, but the lion be taught gentleness. Let us return to the text proposed: 'If the spirit of one having power ascend upon you, leave not your place.' After which follows: 'because healing will make the greatest sins to cease.' This little verse has this meaning: if a snake ascend into your thoughts, keep your heart with all watchfulness, and with David sing:

'Cleanse me from my secret faults, O Lord, and spare your servant from those of others'; and you will in no wise arrive at the greatest sin, which is perpetrated in deed, but you will straightway cut the throat of the incitements of vices in your mind, and dash the little Babylonians against the rock, on which the traces of the serpent are not found; and warily you promise to the Lord: 'If they shall not have had dominion over me, then shall I be blameless and shall be cleansed from the greatest offence.' This is what Scripture also testifies elsewhere: 'I will repay the sins of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation' — that God does not straightway punish our thoughts and the decree of the mind, but repays them in our posterity, that is, in evil works and in perseverance in offences; as he speaks through Amos:

'For three transgressions and for four of this and that city, shall I not turn away from it?' Let it suffice to have plucked these few flowers hastily, as it were from the most beautiful meadow of the Holy Scriptures, for your admonition, that you may close the chamber of your breast and fortify your brow with the frequent sign, lest the destroyer of Egypt find in you a place, but the firstborn, which perish among the Egyptians, be saved in your mind; and that you may say with the prophet: 'My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready; I will sing and give praise. Arise, my glory; arise, psaltery and harp' — which Tyre also, pierced with many wounds of sins, is bidden to take up, that she may do penance and wash away the stains of her former foulness with bitter tears, like Peter.

But let us be ignorant of penance, lest we sin lightly. Let penance be, as it were, a second plank for the wretched after shipwreck: in an unblemished virgin let the ship be preserved. It is one thing to seek back what you have lost, another to possess what you have never lost. Hence the Apostle also chastised his body and brought it into servitude, lest, preaching to others, he himself should be found reprobate; and, inflamed by the ardours of the body in the person of the human race, he said: 'Wretched man that I am, who shall free me from the body of this death?' And again: 'I know that there dwells not in me, that is in my flesh, any good; for to will is present with me, but to accomplish the good, I find not. For the good that I will, I do not; but the evil that I will not, that I do.' And once more:

'They that are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwells in you.' After a most diligent guard over your thoughts, you must take up the arms of fasting and sing with David: 'I humbled my soul in fasting,' and: 'I ate ashes as bread,' and: 'When they were troublesome to me, I clothed myself in sackcloth.' Eve was cast out of paradise through food. Elijah, exercised by a fast of forty days, was caught up to heaven in a fiery chariot. Moses for forty days and nights was fed on the intimacy and speech of God, and proved most true in himself: 'Man lives not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.'