and since the people of Bourges demand that the honourable man Simplicius be ordained bishop for them, decide what I ought to do about so great a business. For you are of such regard toward me, or of such authority toward the rest, that whatever you shall wish to be done (and you will wish whatever is most just), you ought not so much to advise as to command. Yet know that of this Simplicius very many good things are related, and those indeed by very many good men. These testimonies, at the first face of the conversation, were judged by me not sufficiently pleasing, because too pleasing to court favour. But after your... I saw his rivals do nothing more than keep silent, and those especially who cherish the faith of the Arians; nor was anything unlawful set against the one named, although he was not yet of our profession:
I turned my attention to the fact that a man may be reckoned most exact, of whom a bad citizen could not speak, nor a good one keep silent. But why have I, inept, added these things, as though I who asked were giving counsel? Rather, all things shall be arranged by your nod, your discretion, and your letters, and made manifest to the priests and the people. For neither are we so foolish in every respect as to decree that you must first be summoned, if it is possible for you to come; then, if you should do anything, certainly be consulted, unless in all things about to obey you. Deign to be mindful of me, my lord bishop. LETTER IX. Sidonius to his lord bishop Perpetuus, greeting.
Out of a desire for spiritual readings—of which the library of the catholic faith, both through its authentic authors and through its disputants, is most familiar to you—you wish to know even those things which are least worthy to occupy the scrutiny of your ears. For you enjoin that I direct to you the discourse which I seem to have delivered as a sermon to the people of Bourges in the church: to which neither rhetorical division, nor the threats of oratory, nor grammatical figures supplied a fitting decorum and discipline. For neither there, as is the custom for those who declaim precisely, did it please to fit together either historical weights, or poetic figures, or the sparks of controversial perorations.
For when the seditions, partisanships, and diversities of the factions were dragging me in different directions, the very injury supplied me with matter for composing, in the same measure that the occupation withdrew the time. Indeed, so great was the crowd of competitors, that not even two benches could hold the very numerous candidates for a single chair. All pleased themselves, all displeased everyone. For neither should we have been able to take any common counsel, unless the people, softened, making a jettison of their own judgement, had rather subjected itself to the sacerdotal judgement: a few of the presbyters, to be sure, stammering in corners; but openly not even muttering, because most of them dreaded their own order no less than the rest.
Therefore, while individuals privately guard themselves wholly, it came about that all heard without disdain that which they would thereafter ambitiously seek. And so take the page attached to the volumes appended below: which, dictated in two watches of a single summer's night—Christ being my witness—I greatly fear lest you may believe the reading itself, which proves this of itself, more than you believe me. Deign to be mindful of me, my lord bishop. THE SERMON. Secular history relates, most beloved, that a certain one of the philosophers, when disciples came to him, showed them the discipline of keeping silent before that of speaking: and thus made all the beginners endure a mute five years among the chairs of the disputing followers;
so that not even the swifter talents of certain ones might be permitted to be praised before it was fitting for them to be recognized. Thus it came about that, when these same men spoke after long silence, whoever had begun to hear them did not keep silent: because until nature has imbibed knowledge, there is no greater glory in having said what you know than in having kept silent about what you do not know. But now a far different condition awaits my mediocrity: upon me, walking through the sighing chasms and wallowing-places of my disgraceful deeds, the weight of this profession has been forced. And before I render to any of the good the compliance of a learner, I am compelled to owe to others the duty of a teacher. To this impossibility is added the weight of shame;
in that, by the presentation of a decretal page peculiar to me, you entrusted to me the judgement of choosing a bishop, in the presence of the most holy and the supreme pontificate, of a most worthy bishop: who, since he is the head of his province, is also more excellent than I in training, in eloquence, in privilege, in seniority, in age. And I, both about to make speeches and in the presence of the metropolitan, being both a provincial and a junior, bear alike the bashfulness of the inexpert and the odium of the presumptuous. But since it so pleased your error that I myself, lacking prudence, should seek out for you a prudent man—into whose person many good things concur—under Christ's help a bishop: know that by an assent of this kind I take up much of honour, more of burden.
In the first place, weigh the great burden of public opinion, in that you have enjoined consummate judgements upon a beginner: and you demand from him the straight path of counsel, in a matter in which you recall that error was but lately committed. Therefore, since it was so at heart to you, I beseech you, that such as you believe us in faith, such you may make us by intercession; and deign to bear our humility up to heaven by prayers rather than by applause. Yet first it is fitting for you to know into what Scyllas of reproaches, and into what barkings of tongues—but of human ones—the whirlwind of certain men attempting to defame you has cast me. For there is a certain force in evil manners, that the crimes of a few disfigure the innocence of the multitude:
although, on the contrary, the rarity of good men cannot excuse the crimes of many, their virtues being shared in common. If I shall have named any of the monks—though he be comparable to the Pauls, Antonies, Hilarions, Macarii, and be accompanied by the prerogative of the anchoretic life he has pursued—straightway the murmur of ignoble dwarfs, complaining, batters my ears, beset with an unruly tumult: 'This man who is named,' they say, 'fulfils the office not of a bishop but rather of an abbot; and he can intercede for souls before the heavenly judge rather than for bodies before the earthly one.' But who would not grow exasperated, when he sees the sincerity of virtues befouled by the accusation of vices? If we choose a humble man, he is called abject;
if we bring forward an upright one, he is judged to be haughty. If one less trained, he is believed to be laughed at on account of his inexperience; if somewhat learned, he is cried out to be puffed up on account of his knowledge. If severe, he is shuddered at as though cruel; if indulgent, he is blamed for his easiness. If simple, he is despised as brutish; if keen, he is shunned as cunning. If diligent, he is deemed superstitious; if remiss, he is judged negligent. If shrewd, greedy; if quiet, he is pronounced sluggish. If we produce an abstemious man, he is taken for a miser; if one who feeds by dining, he is charged with gluttony; if one who fasts by feeding others, he is accused of vanity. Liberty they condemn as wickedness; modesty they disdain as rusticity;
the rigid they do not hold dear on account of their austerity; the gentle among them become cheap through their fellowship. And if one lives among them in either kind of manner, yet here the character of the good parties will always be barbed by the pricking tongues of slanderers, as though by double hooks. Amid these things there is scarcely subjected to monastic disciplines either the stiff-neckedness of the common folk or the license of the clergy. If I say a cleric, those following emulate him, those preceding disparage. For thus a few of them—be it said with the peace of the rest—reckon that only length of clerical service is to be counted as merit; so that in consecrating a bishop they would wish to choose not usefulness, but age:
as though to have lived long rather than well ought to be accepted for the attaining of the supreme priesthood, as the privilege, adornment, and enticement of all graces. And thus certain men—sluggish in ministering, swift in slandering, idle in deliberations, occupied in seditions, weak in charity, robust in faction, stable in the preservation of rivalries, wavering in the assertion of judgements—strive to rule the Church, men who now must needs be ruled on account of old age. But it does not please me longer, on account of the ambitions of a few, to mark the persons of many: this alone do I add, that, since I bring forward no one by name, let him confess a rebuff who professes an offence.
Indeed I say this more freely: that of the multitude standing round, many are fit to be bishops, but that all cannot be bishops; and since individuals possess the property of diverse charisms, all are sufficient for themselves, but no single one is sufficient for all. If perchance I name a military person, straightway men rise up into these words: 'Sidonius, because he was transferred to the clerical state from a secular profession, therefore dissembles his taking to himself the metropolitan from the religious congregation: he is swollen with his birth, is exalted by the insignia of dignities, he despises the poor of Christ.' Wherefore for the present I shall discharge that faith which I owe not so much to the charity of the good as to the suspicion of the slanderers.
As the Holy Spirit lives, our almighty God, who by the voice of Peter condemned in Simon Magus his supposing that he could purchase the grace of benediction for a price: I have, in the man whom I judged suitable for you, favoured neither money nor favour; but, the estate of the person, the time, the province, the city having been weighed more than enough, I have believed him most fitting—a man whose life will be briefly unrolled in what follows. Blessed Simplicius, hitherto to be reckoned a companion of your order, and now henceforth (only may God assent through you) of ours, so answers to either party, whether by deed or by profession, that both the commonwealth may find in him something to admire, and the Church something to love.
If reverence is to be paid to a man's birth (for the Evangelist too showed that this ought not to be passed over: when Luke undertook the praise of John he reckoned it a most excellent thing that he came of priestly stock, and, though about to proclaim the nobility of his life, yet first set forth the dignity of his family), then this man's forebears presided either over episcopal chairs or over tribunals. Illustrious in either way of life, his lineage flourished either in bishops or in prefects; so that among his ancestors it has ever been the case that one or another had the boldness to declare either human or divine law. And if we weigh his own person with more careful deliberation, we find that he holds here a place among men of the first rank.
But you say that the men Eucherius and Pannychius are held to be higher and more illustrious: granted that hitherto they have been so thought; yet for the present cause they are, by the canon, no longer eligible, since both of them have passed to second marriages. If we reckon his years, he has vigour from his youth and counsel from his age. If we compare his letters or his talent, his nature vies with his learning. If kindliness be required, to citizen, cleric, stranger, to the least and the greatest alike it is offered even beyond his means, and often it was rather the man who was not going to repay who received his bread. If the necessity of undertaking an embassy pressed upon him, more than once he stood for this city before kings clad in skins, or before princes robed in purple.
If it be questioned under what master he was steeped in the first rudiments of the faith, then—to speak in a proverb—he had at home whence to learn. Lastly, beloved, this is that man to whom, set in the darkness of a prison-dungeon, the bolts of the barbarian gaol, though barred many times over, were laid open by divine power. Him, as we have heard, you will cry out that he ought to be led to the priesthood, his father-in-law no less than his own father being passed over. And at that very time he brought the greatest praise upon his house, when he chose rather to be honoured by his parents' dignity than by his own. I had almost passed over what ought not to be passed over.
Under Moses of old, as the psalmist says, in the days of antiquity, that the form of the tabernacle of the covenant might rise up, all Israel in the wilderness, before the feet of Bezalel, heaped together the token of a freewill offering. Solomon afterwards, that he might build the temple in Jerusalem, strained the whole strength of the people upon the work—although the captive wealth of the Palestinians, and the tributary payments of the surrounding kings, and the treasure of the southern queen of Sheba had swelled it. This man, while yet a youth, a soldier, of slender means, alone, still a son under his father's care and already a father himself, built a church for you. Neither the tenacity of the old nor regard for his little ones held him back from his purposed devotion; yet he had a way of life such that it kept silence about itself.
For he is a man, unless I am mistaken, wholly averse to all vulgar popularity: he seeks the favour, not of everyone, but of the good; not cheapened by indiscriminate familiarity, but made precious by a tested fellowship; and, with his good manliness, desiring rather to profit his rivals than to please them; to be compared with stern fathers, who think not so much of their young sons' wishes as of their advantage. In adversity steadfast, in doubtful things faithful, in prosperity modest, in dress plain, in speech courteous, in company equable, in counsel pre-eminent. Proved friendships he earnestly seeks, steadfastly holds, and forever keeps. Enmities not of his own making he pursues honourably, is slow to believe them, and quick to lay them down.
He is most to be canvassed for precisely because he is least ambitious: he strives not to seize the priesthood, but to deserve it. Someone will say to me: How have you learned so much about him so quickly? To whom I answer: I knew the men of Bourges before I knew Bourges itself. We come to know many on a journey, many in fellow-service, many in a contract, many in a discourse, many in their own travels and many in ours. Very many shortcuts to knowledge are given us even by reputation, since nature has set no narrower bounds to fame than to a fatherland. Wherefore, if the standing of cities is to be reckoned not so much by the compass of their walls as by the renown of their citizens, I have learned not only who you were first, but where you were.
On his father's side he is descended from the stock of the Palladii, who held with credit to their order either the chairs of letters or those of the altars. And since a matron's person demands a modest and restrained mention of herself, I would firmly assert that this lady answers to the priesthoods of both her families—both where she was reared and grew up, and whither she was chosen and passed over. They both instruct their children well and prudently; and the father, compared with them, begins thereby to be the happier, because he is outdone.
And since you have sworn that the judgement of my littleness shall prevail in this election (seeing that it is no more binding to speak the sacraments than to write them): In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, it is Simplicius whom I pronounce ought to be made metropolitan of our province and chief priest of your city. But concerning the man of whom we speak, if you follow my new judgement, be in harmony with your own old one. LETTER X. Sidonius to Pope Auspicius, greeting. If the reckoning of times and regions allowed it, I would take care to cherish friendships once entered upon not by the mere offices of words alone. But since the storm of clashing kingdoms roars all too loudly against the peace I desire between brethren;
at least, among those who are sundered and separated, the custom of correspondence by letter shall by right be retained—a custom long ago rightly introduced under the pretext of charity, and granted to us by ancient examples. It remains that you pardon your anxious admirer the fault of a missed meeting: a fault whereby, that it may not be continually refined by the sacrosanct contemplation of your countenance, it now fears danger from neighbours, now envy from patrons. But of these matters even these many words are too many. Meanwhile I introduce Peter, a man of tribune's rank, the bearer of my message, who himself diligently requests this very thing; and who can more concisely by a present account make known what business he brings. To him I pray that whatever help is in your power may accrue, out of regard for this present page;
the respect for equity nonetheless abiding, against which I have not been wont to commend even the causes of my nearest friends. Deign to be mindful of us, my lord bishop. LETTER XI. Sidonius to the lord bishop Graecus, greeting. I envy the good fortune of the habitual letter-carrier, to whom it has fallen more often to see you. But what shall I say of Amantius, when I envy even my own letters, which shall be unsealed by sacrosanct fingers and inspected by your gaze? And I, shut up here within the half-burnt straits of a fragile wall, in the terror of a war close at hand, am in no way permitted to satisfy my longing for you. And would that this were the character or the case of the Arvernian region, that we, the less excusable, might be excused!
But what is harder, it comes about through the deserts of our own injustice that we lack no just excuse. Wherefore, having first offered the greeting, as the custom of duty demands, I earnestly beg that meanwhile you remit the debt of a meeting, or discharge it with words. For if freedom of coming and going be restored by peace, I shall the more fear this—that the constancy of my presence might prove rather a weariness. Deign to be mindful of us, my lord bishop. LETTER XII. Sidonius to Ferreolus, greeting. If we were to consider the time, the order, and the station of our friendship and kinship rather than of your person, then rightly in this work, small as it is, the first rubrics of the titles and the first offices of words would be dedicated to you.
My pen would have passed through your ancestral curule chairs; it would nonetheless have enumerated your patrician fillets; it would not have kept silence about your threefold prefectures, and for your Syagrius it would not have denied its heralds' praises in return for so many changes of heralds. Thence it would have run through your father and uncles, by no means to be passed over in silence: and although it might have been wearied out with the triumphal glories of your family, yet it would not have been so exhausted in unfolding the pedigrees of your ancestors that on this account it should grow too blunt to narrate your own glory: for even if in writing of the virtues of your forefathers it had been dulled, by your own merits it would be sharpened anew. But, being about to appoint the greeting owed to you, it considered not what you had been, but rather what you now are.
It passed over the Gauls administered by you at the very time when they were most unharmed. It passed over how you alone, by the wholesomeness of your dispositions, endured Attila the foe of the Rhine, Thorismund the guest of the Rhône, and Aëtius the deliverer of the Loire: and how, on account of such great prudence and foresight, the provincials submitted their willing necks to your chariot with the loudest burst of applause; because you so guided the reins of the Gauls that the landowner, worn out, was relieved of the burden of tribute. It passed over the most ferocious king of Gothia, softened by your address—honeyed, weighty, subtle, unwonted—and how from the gates of the Arlesians you removed by a banquet him whom Aëtius could not have removed by battle.
All these things it passed over, hoping that your name might more fittingly be joined henceforth to the names of bishops rather than of senators: and it judged it more just that you should be set among the perfect ones of Christ rather than among the prefects of Valentinian. Nor let a malicious interpreter turn it to your discredit that you have been ranked with priests rather; for a great ignorance of ranks holds those who would derogate something on this ground: since, when a public festivity makes a feast, the man who is a guest at the first table takes precedence, but he is the last to him who shall have been first at the second: thus, without dispute, according to the judgement of good men, the man of higher station—though less religious—is reckoned more excellent than one who is greatly honoured. Farewell. Pray for us. LETTER XIII.
Sidonius to his friend Sulpicius, greeting. Himerius the bishop, your son, hitherto little known to me by face but well enough by repute—a repute that inclined to the good side—came lately from Troyes to Lyons: where, glimpsed by me hastily and briefly, he restored to us, by the imitation of his character, holy bishop Lupus, easily the first of the Gallican pontiffs, the master both of his profession and the author of his dignity. Good God! what judgement joined with charm the man has, if he chance to deliberate on anything, or to give counsel! He abounds in the salt of wit when he is consulted, in honey when he counsels. The man has the utmost care for letters, but chiefly for religious ones, in which the marrow of the meaning occupies him more than the froth of words.
His whole intent in his actions—their swiftness, their delay—is Christ; and, what you may wonder at or praise, he does nothing idle, though he does nothing that is not calm. He delights in fasts, he acquiesces in food; he cleaves to the former for the custom of the cross, he is bent to the latter for the grace of charity. He does both with the utmost measure: for he restrains, as often as he resolves to dine, his gluttony; as often as to abstain, his ostentation. He multiplies his own duties, avoids those of others; and although it is fitting that others should in turn come out to meet him, he holds it more welcome if mutual honour be owed to him rather than repaid. At a banquet, on a journey, in an assembly, he yields to his inferiors; whence it comes that the crowd of his superiors the more gladly sets itself below him.
He dispenses his speech with the utmost temperance towards the one conversing with him; wherein he suffers no wrong—neither the stranger to feel shame, nor the intimate to feel injury, nor the trusting to feel envy, nor the curious to feel rebuff, nor the suspicious to feel malice; nor the skilled to feel calumny, nor the unskilled to feel disgrace. He keeps the simplicity of the dove in the church, the cunning of the serpent in the forum; he is judged prudent to the good, wary to the wicked, shrewd to the crafty. Why say more? He has now given you back to us entirely: he has copied out, with a pleasing likeness, your whole temperance, religion, liberty, modesty, and that most chaste tenderness of a refined mind. Wherefore, as much as you shall henceforth wish to enjoy your retirement and indulge your seclusion, you may indulge it:
since in my brother Himerius we already hold you both—a grandfather in name, a father in face, and both in prudence. Farewell. LETTER XIV. Sidonius to his friend Philagrius, greeting. Lately among men of the highest rank (there was a numerous company too) mention was made of you. All the good men in common thought all good things of you, though each severally spoke of the various kinds of your virtues. Indeed, when someone boasted, beyond what was fair, of your presence, as though they knew you better, I flared up. For, since I could not with equanimity allow it to be said that a man of all letters was better known to the neighbouring rustics than to those trained but more remote, the contention proceeded further:
and when some persisted stubbornly in this error (for it is characteristic of the ignorant that, as they are easily refuted, so they are hard to restrain), I steadfastly asserted that, if to eloquent friends a contemplative acquaintance should never come, it is harsh, yet somehow tolerable: because their own talents prevail—before whom civic inexperience wanders abroad—to reach out, with the pen assisting, to the desires of remote provinces: through which pen there is often gathered, of the merely absent educated, as great an affection as is not accomplished even by present assiduity. Therefore, if it be so, let them cease to slander the necessity of our common absence—men who are heralds of faces rather than of characters.
Indeed, if human substance is to be judged more rightly by bulk than by mind, I am for the most part ignorant what, according to bodily size—however far extended, yet finite—we should admire in man, than whom the condition of birth has produced nothing equally wretched and destitute: seeing that, as if from the opposite side, it bestows on the ox a coat of hair, on the boar bristles, on the bird a clothing of feathers; to which, moreover, that they may either inflict or repel force, horn, tooth, and claw are inborn weapons: whereas our own limbs you might reckon cast out into this world alone, not brought forth; and whereas nature, with manifold defence for begetting the limbs of the other animals, comes as it were like a mother with open bosom, she poured forth human bodies only, playing in a manner the stepmother to their weakness.
For this, as I judge—I who count your mind superior to your limbs—admits of no equality: that the reasoning of the intellectual soul has raised our estate above the beasts, which know not the true and the false. And if for a little while those men would set aside its dignity—men who look upon their friends, playing the fool, not so much with judgement as with the eye—then let them say, I would ask, what in the form of man they think sufficiently excellent, what worthy of regard. Stature? as though this were not often more fitly suited to beams of timber. Or strength? which reigns mightier in the muscles of a lion's neck. Or beauty of features? which clay often better imprints on images, and wax on paintings. Or swiftness? which is more competently ascribed to dogs.
Or vigilance? with which the owl too vies. Or voice? in clearness of which the ass will not have yielded. Or industry? to which, after its own measure, not even the ant is afraid to be compared. But perhaps they prefer the power of seeing: as though the sight of eagles were not more eminent. They prefer the efficacy of hearing: as though the bristly hog did not surpass in hearing. They prefer the subtlety of smelling: as though the vulture did not go before in the sense of smell. They prefer the discernment of tasting: as though we did not in most part yield here even to the ape. What shall I say of touch, the fifth sense of our body, which the philosopher and the little worm alike appropriate to themselves without distinction?
I keep silence here about the enticing appetites which pleasure, inclined to a bestial motion, shares in the coupling of human flesh. Behold what misery they prefer and cultivate, who swell up and insult me because I am known to them by sight alone. But I for my part always see that Philagrius whose face, were I to see it silent, I should not be seeing Philagrius: whence that well-known likeness which someone spoke, in a different case but with the same sentiment: The Roman people did not recognize the son of Marcus Cicero when he spoke. For by the universal judgement it has been acclaimed that the dignity of knowledge and virtue is the prerogative, to whose highest summit one ascends by the steps of merits. First, even the bestial body, if perchance it has already been formed, transcends in dignity the formless matter.