Letters & Lives of Saints 1 part 2/2

And lest you think this false, in the manner of an orator I will, after arguments, call witnesses. The holy brother Heliodorus was here, who, when he wished to inhabit the desert with me, was put to flight by my crimes and departed. But all the blame will be excused by present long-windedness. For, as Flaccus says in his satire: 'All singers have this fault: among friends,' when asked, 'they never sing; unbidden, they never leave off' (Hor. Serm. 1.3.1-3); so I will henceforth overwhelm you with bundles of letters, so that, on the contrary, you may begin to ask that I not write. My sister, your daughter in Christ, I rejoice—you being the first to announce it—is persevering in that which she had begun. For here, where I now am, I am ignorant not only of what is being done in my homeland, but even whether the homeland itself still stands.

And although the Iberian viper may tear me apart with sinister rumor, I will not fear the judgment of men, for I shall have my own judge: 'If the broken world should fall in, the ruins will strike him undismayed' (Hor. Carm. 3.3.7-8). Wherefore I ask that, mindful of the apostolic precept by which he teaches that our work ought to endure, you both prepare for yourself a reward from the Lord in her salvation, and make me happier by frequent letters through our common glory in Christ. 7: To Chromatius, Jovinus, and Eusebius. Paper ought not to divide those whom mutual love has joined, nor are the offices of my speech to be apportioned among you individually, since you so love one another that charity joins three of you no less than nature has joined two.

Rather, if the condition of the matter allowed it, I would enclose your undivided names under a single tip of the little pen, since you provoke me by your letters in such a way that I reckon both three in one and one in three. For after they were brought to me, through holy Evagrius's conveyance, into that part of the desert which draws its vast boundary line between the Syrians and the Saracens, I so rejoiced that I outdid that day of Roman happiness on which the proud columns of Hannibal first fell, in the battle of Marcellus at Nola after the fight at Cannae. And although the aforesaid brother often visits me and so cherishes me as his own bowels in Christ, yet, separated from me by a long stretch, he left me by his going away no less longing than he had brought me joy by his coming.

Now I converse with your letters, I embrace them, they speak with me, they alone here know Latin. For here either a barbarous tongue must be learned from the old man, or one must be silent. As often as the well-known hands bring back to me your faces most dear, with their impressed traces, so often either I am not here, or you are here. Believe love telling the truth: even as I wrote these things, I saw you. Of you I make this first complaint: why, with so many intervening spaces of sea and lands, you sent so small a letter—unless it be that I deserved it, who, as you write, did not write to you before. I do not think paper was lacking, since Egypt furnishes the commerce.

And if some Ptolemy had closed the seas, yet King Attalus had sent parchments from Pergamum, so that the scarcity of paper might be made up by skins; whence the name of parchment has been preserved to this very day, posterity handing it down to one another. What then? Should I judge that the carrier hastened? Yet a single night suffices for a long letter. Or that you were detained by some occupation? No necessity is greater than charity. Two things remain: that either it irked you, or I did not deserve it. Of these I prefer to charge you with tardiness than to condemn myself as undeserving. For negligence can more easily be amended than love be born.

Bonosus, as you write, has sought watery places like a son of the fish (ichthys); we, filthy with our former contagion like serpents and scorpions, pursue whatever is parched. He already treads upon the head of the snake; we are still food to the serpent eating earth by the divine sentence. He can already climb the topmost psalm of the steps; we, still weeping at the first ascent, know not whether it may ever befall us to say: 'I lifted up my eyes to the mountains, whence help may come to me' (Ps. 120:1). He, among the threatening waves of the world, sitting in the safe bosom of the island—that is, of the Church—after the example of John, perhaps already devours the book; I, lying in the sepulcher of my crimes and bound with the chains of sins, await the Lord's cry from the Gospel:

'Jerome, come forth.' Bonosus, I say—since, according to the prophet, all the devil's strength is in the loins—carried his loincloth across the Euphrates, hiding it there in the cleft of the rock, and afterward, finding it torn, he sang: 'Lord, you have possessed my reins' (Ps. 138:3); 'you have burst my bonds; to you I will sacrifice a victim of praise.' The true Nebuchadnezzar led me, fettered, to Babylon—that is, to the confusion of my mind; there he laid upon me the yoke of captivity; there, fastening a ring of iron, he bade me sing of the songs of Zion. To whom I said: 'The Lord looses the fettered; the Lord enlightens the blind' (Ps. 145:7-8); and, that I may briefly end the comparison I have begun, I beg for pardon, he awaits the crown.

My sister is the fruit of holy Julian in Christ: he planted, you water, the Lord will give the increase. Jesus granted her to me, alive, in place of that wound which the devil had inflicted—giving her back living for one dead. For her, as the gentile poet says, I fear all things, even safe ones (cf. Verg. Aen. 4.298). You yourselves know the slippery road of youth, on which I too slipped and which you crossed without fear. As she now especially enters upon it, she must be propped up by everyone's precepts, must be sustained by everyone's comforts—that is, must be strengthened by the frequent letters of your holiness. And because charity bears all things, I beseech that you also exact letters from Pope Valerianus to comfort her.

You know that the minds of girls are for the most part strengthened by these things, if they understand themselves to be a care to their elders. For in my homeland, the local product of rusticity, the belly is god and one lives for the day: he is the holier who is the richer. To this dish there has been added, according to a proverb worn smooth in the people's speech, a fitting lid. The priest Lupicinus—according to that saying too, about which Lucilius says Crassus laughed once in his life (1299 Marx): 'the lips have a lettuce like to themselves, as the ass eats the thistle'—namely, that a feeble pilot should steer a perforated ship, and the blind lead the blind into the pit, and such a ruler be as those who are ruled.

The common mother—who, although she is joined to you in sanctity, surpasses you in this, that she bore such children, whose womb may truly be called golden—we greet with that honor which you know; together also the sisters, to be looked up to by all, who have conquered their sex along with the world, who, with oil amply prepared for their lamps, await the coming of the bridegroom. O blessed house, in which dwell the widow Anna, the virgin prophetesses, a twofold Samuel nurtured in the temple! O happy roofs, beneath which we behold a martyr mother girded with the crowns of the Maccabean martyrs!

For although you confess Christ daily by keeping his commandments, yet to your private glory there has now been added this public and open confession as well, namely that through you the poison of the Arian dogma was once driven out of your city. [6.3] And perhaps you will marvel that I have begun afresh now that the letter is already at its end. What am I to do? I cannot deny my heart its voice. The brevity of a letter compels me to be silent, longing for you forces me to speak. My speech is too hasty; my discourse is thrown into confusion and disorder; love knows no order. 8: To Nicias the subdeacon of Aquileia. Turpilius the comic poet, treating of the exchange of letters, says: 'It is the one thing alone that makes absent men present.'

Nor did he give a false judgement, even though it touched upon something not literally true. For what, so to speak, is so present among those who are absent as, by means of letters, both to address and to hear those whom you love? Indeed even those rude men of early Italy, whom Ennius calls 'the men of old,' who, as Cicero says in his Rhetoric, sought to sustain their life with wild fare, before the use of paper and parchment used to send their mutual conversations by letter either upon little tablets hewn from wood or upon the bark of trees; whence too they called the carriers of these 'tabellarii' (tablet-bearers), and the scribes 'librarii,' from the inner bark (liber) of trees.

How much more, then, ought we, in a world now refined by the arts, not to neglect that which those provided for themselves among whom there was crude rusticity, and who in a manner knew nothing of civilization! Behold, blessed Chromatius, together with holy Eusebius, his brother no less in equality of character than of nature, has challenged me to this literary duty. Do only you, in departing from us, rather rend than unstitch our new-formed friendship—a thing which Laelius wisely forbids; unless perhaps the East is so hateful to you that you dread that even your letters should come hither. Awake, awake, rouse yourself from sleep, grant a single small sheet of paper to charity, amid the delights of your homeland, the sighs we once shared together in our common wandering. If you love me, write back;

if you are angry, then write even in anger. I shall hold even this for a great solace of my longing, if I receive a friend's letter, even an indignant one. 9: To Chrysocomas the monk of Aquileia. What affection I bear toward you, Heliodorus, dear to us both, could faithfully report; for he loves you with no less love than I do—so that I always sound your name upon my lips, so that at every first conversation I recall the most delightful fellowship I had with you, so that I admire your humility, extol your virtue, and proclaim your charity.

But you—just as the lynx by nature has this trait, that looking back it does not remember what lay before, and the mind loses what the eyes have ceased to see—so, utterly forgetful of our bond, you have erased that letter which the Apostle says is written upon the hearts of Christians, not with a swift smudge, but, as they say, down to the deepest wax. And indeed those beasts of which we spoke, lurking beneath the leafy branch of a tree, seize the fleeing roe-deer or the timid stag, that fearful creature, and as the prey runs in vain, while it carries its own enemy along with it, they tear it apart from above with ravening jaws, and they remember their preying only so long as the empty belly chafes a parched throat with hunger;

but once their fierceness, fed with blood, has filled their distended bowels, with satiety there comes a forgetfulness destined to know nothing of what it might seize, until hunger should recall the memory. You, not yet sated with us, why do you join an ending to a beginning? Why do you let go before you have grasped? Unless perhaps, with the excuse of negligence ever your companion, you should claim that you had nothing to write—when you ought to have written this very thing, that you had nothing else to write. 10: To old Paulus of Concordia. [1.1] The brevity of human life is a condemnation of our faults, and death, often following hard upon the newborn at the very threshold of light, declares that the ages slip daily into vice.

For when the serpent, having entangled the dweller of Paradise in his viperous coils, had first led him down to earth, eternity, exchanged for mortality, postponed for a while—into nine hundred years and more—the sentence pronounced upon the accursed man, granting a kind of second immortality. Thence, as sin gradually broke out anew, the impiety of the giants brought the shipwreck of the whole world. [1.2] After that baptism, so to speak, of the cleansed world, the life of men was contracted into a brief span. And this span too, since our crimes ever fight against the things of God, we have well nigh squandered. For how few are they who either pass beyond a hundred years of age, or do not reach it in such a way that they repent of having reached it—according to what the Scripture testifies in the book of Psalms:

"The days of our life are seventy years, or, if in strength, eighty; whatever is more than this is labour and sorrow" [Ps. 89:10]? [2.1] 'To what end,' you say, 'is all this fetched from so lofty a starting-point and begun so far off, that anyone might rightly mock us with Horace's wit, that "he begins the Trojan war from the twin egg"?' It is, of course, so that with fitting words I may proclaim your old age and your head, white in the likeness of Christ. [2.2] Behold, already the circle of a hundred years of life rolls round, and you, ever keeping the Lord's commandments, by examples of present things meditate upon the blessedness of the life to come.

Your eyes are vigorous with pure light, your feet press firm footsteps, your hearing is keen, your teeth white, your voice melodious, your body sound and full of vigour. Your grey hairs are at odds with your ruddy complexion, your strength disagrees with your years. A more advanced old age has not loosened the tenacity of your memory, as we see in most men; cold blood has not blunted the edge of your warm wit; a furrowed brow does not roughen a face contracted with wrinkles; nor, finally, does a trembling hand drive the wandering stylus along crooked paths in the wax. [2.3] In you the Lord has shown us the freshness of the resurrection to come, that we may know it belongs to sin that the rest, while still living, die before their time in the flesh, but to righteousness that you feign youth in another's age.

And although we see this bodily health befall many, even sinners, yet to those the devil supplies it that they may sin, while to you the Lord grants it that you may rejoice. [3.1] All the most learned of the Greeks—of whom Cicero, pleading on behalf of Flaccus, eloquently says, "their inborn fickleness and learned vanity"—used to speak the praises of their kings or princes for a fee received. Doing this now myself, I demand a price for my praises.

[3.2] And lest you think that what I beg is small, you have asked a pearl from the Gospel: the words of the Lord, chaste words, silver tried by fire from the earth, purified sevenfold—namely the commentaries of Fortunatianus, and, for the knowledge of the persecutors, the history of Aurelius Victor, and likewise the letters of Novatian, so that, while we recognize the poisons of that schismatic man, we may the more gladly drink the antidote of the holy martyr Cyprian. [3.3] Meanwhile I have sent to you—that is, to old Paulus—the elder Paul, in lowering whose style I have laboured much for the sake of the simpler folk. But somehow, even if it be filled with water, the flask still keeps the same odour with which it was steeped while it was new.

If this little gift pleases you, we have still other wares stored up, which, if the Holy Spirit shall breathe favourably, will sail to you together with very many oriental goods.