Since you are reported to act noble without pride, powerful without envy, religious without superstition, lettered without boastfulness, grave without ineptitude, witty without effort, constant without harshness, common without commonness. Besides, report adds this most excellent thing to these goods: that it asserts you transcend all these graces of most exalted charity by the very citadel of charity. Fame, I say, which, though it sings much of your praises, keeps back still more. For to those set farther off it can assign the purpose of your actions, not their number. Kindled by the report of them, of my own accord, as befits one far inferior, I run first to discharge my duties;
nor do I fear to be at any time accused of garrulity, I who until now could be blamed for taciturnity. I commend Promotus, the bearer of these letters, already known to us before, but lately made, through your prayers, our fellow-tribesman: who, though a Jew by race, has by faith preferred to be reckoned an Israelite rather than by blood; and, aspiring to the citizenship of that heavenly city, and disdaining the killing letter for the quickening spirit; alike contemplating on the one hand the rewards set before the just, and foreseeing on the other that, unless he made a crossing-over from circumcision to Christ, he would suffer eternal punishments coequal through the everlasting ages: he chose rather to have Jerusalem reckoned his fatherland than Hierosolyma.
These things being known, let spiritual Sarah receive into her maternal arms this now truer son of Abraham as he approaches. For he ceased to belong to Hagar the handmaid at that moment when he exchanged the servitude of legal observance for the liberty of grace. For the rest, what may have been for him the very cause of his coming, the same man will be able, in a present and profitable narration, to explain. But to us he is held most dear for the reasons I wrote above: which I signify because he most effectively commends any man who has laid open the pure grounds of a just commendation. Deign to be mindful of us, lord bishop. LETTER XIV. Sidonius to the lord bishop Principius, greeting. Long since, venerable bishop, even if your face has not yet been beheld by us, yet your conduct has been looked upon.
For the widespread praise of the saints' merits, extending over spaces, is not content with final bounds. Hence it is that, because no measure is set to a good conscience, neither is a term found to a good reputation. Deem what I say false, unless a competent voucher, suited to my profession, shall come forward: once a head conspicuous in that monastery of Lérins, a fellow-cell-dweller of the Lupi and the Maximi, and, aspiring to attain in the woodland tracts of frugality the Memphitic and Palestinian archimandrites—this bishop Antiolus: by whose account I anxiously strove to learn who was a father to you, and what and of what sort you brothers, by what prerogative of character you both discharge the highest pontificate, and I gladly remember that I have come to know it.
To which father, indeed, who once had you as his own, scarcely could the house of Aaron the ancient pontiff be compared by desert: whom, although the right hand of his law-giving brother first anointed him in the midst of the eremitic people with the oil of sanctification, calling his sons to the offices of like ministry; yet the felicity of the man himself over Ithamar and Eleazar was disfigured by Nadab and Abihu, blasted by thunderbolts: whose souls, however slain, though we believe are to be absolved, yet we know their persons were punished. But you, about to touch the page of the altar, offer nothing, as I hear, of strange fire: but with the accompanying victims of charity and chastity, you burn most fragrant incense in the censers of the heart.
To this end, as often as you bind fast the yoke of the law upon the necks of the proud by the bonds of preaching, then you spiritually immolate bulls to God. As often as you drive those polluted by the stench of a luxuriating conscience toward the sweet-savour of chastity by the goads of correction, Christ reckons that you have offered him the rankness of he-goats. As often as, at your exhortations, a soul in any contrite man, having penally recalled its own faults, sighs;
who could doubt that you have sacrificed, with a mystic sacrifice, a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons, which by both number and groaning betoken the twofold substance of our inner and outer man? As often as anyone, at your admonition, has roasted his obese body and the seething fat of a swollen belly, to be cooked by the frequent fire of fastings; there is no doubt that you then consecrate fine flour fried in a certain frying-pan of continence. As often as you persuade someone laying aside the figments of a perfidious mind to answer with sound doctrine, to believe the faith, to hold the way, to hope for life;
who could doubt that, in the amendment of this converted man—one now free from heresy, free from hypocrisy, free from schism—you consecrate the most purified bread of the shewbread with the unleavened cakes of sincerity and truth? Finally, who does not know that whatever in the days of the law was figuratively immolated in bodies, you offer all of it, in the time of grace, manifestly in morals? And therefore I render abundant thanks to God, because, according to the quality of your page, I easily recognize that the aforesaid prelate, though he said great things of you, kept back greater. Wherefore let no one doubt that you, who are good when you are proclaimed, and better when you are read, are best when you are seen.
Megethius the cleric, the bearer of your eloquence, matters having been managed according to your wish, because he brought the gifts of your letters, carries back the services of mine: whom at least we have aided with our wish, since perhaps we cannot in deed: through whom I earnestly beseech that you both, brothers german—you the more frequently—may irrigate our thirst frequently with lettered letters. But if the difficulty of the intervening journey resists our wishes, at least sometimes pray for us who are your suppliants. It is a greater thing, however, if you deign to grant us salvation by rare intercessions, than dignity by frequent addresses. Deign to be mindful of us, lord bishop. LETTER XV. Sidonius to the lord bishop Prosper, greeting.
While with highest praises you wish holy Anianus to be celebrated—that greatest and most consummate pontiff, equal to Lupus and not unequal to Germanus—and desire the character, merits, and virtues of so great and so mighty a man to be fixed in the hearts of the faithful; to whom this too is not without justice given for glory, that he departed leaving you as his successor: you had exacted from me that I should promise you I would in my pen make known to posterity the war of Attila; wherein, namely, were contained the siege, assault, and irruption—but not the sack—of the city of Orléans, and that famous prophecy of the priest heard from heaven. I had begun to write, but, having examined the burden of the work undertaken, I grew weary of having begun: on this account I entrusted to no ears what I had first condemned when I was my own censor.
It will be granted, as I hope, by your prayer and by the merits of that highest prelate, that under some occasion, and indeed a swift one, we may serve his praise. For the rest, do you, a just creditor, praiseworthily indulge this imprudence of a rash debtor, so that what seems to me impossible to discharge may also seem to you impossible to demand back. Deign to be mindful of us, lord bishop. LETTER XVI. Sidonius to his friend Constantius, greeting. I had promised Petronius, the illustrious man, that I would dispatch the present little work in a few letters: whose ears I did not spare, while I spared yours. For I preferred that the labour of correction should regard him, the honour of publication you, and that this volume should come into your hands at another's risk, by my compliance. The promise has been performed:
for if your skill inspects the marks of the titles gathered onto the parchments, an already copious exemplar, unless I am mistaken, knocks at you; already one comes to the margins of the scroll-bosses; already it is time, as the satirist says, that our Orestes be ended even upon his back. Here I have not, after the manner of the old fashion of study, summoned a fictitious Terpsichore; nor beside the bubbling of the Aganippic spring, along the dew-sprinkled banks and mossy pumice-stones, have I drawn my pen. And would that here nothing soft, nothing fluid, nothing borrowed from the common cross-roads might be found. For indeed to a ripe reader, such as you yourself are, not so much diction that is boneless, tender, and enfeebled pleases, as one somewhat old, brawny, and, as it were, masculine. But let those things be reserved for weightier matters:
for me it suffices, if you quickly pardon that we are tardy. Moreover, if the illustrious man had further demanded something to be written on a somewhat ampler scale, we would have fallen into great delays. For through our little cupboards and cells there remained nothing worthy of being brought forth. Whence understand that, although we have not yet ceased to be silent, certainly we have now resolved to fall silent, for a twofold reason: that if we please, few pieces may incite the pleasure of readers; if we are refused, many may not excite disgust: since indeed in this style there is not urbane charm, but rustic simplicity. For whence should we have that austere and most antique kind of speech? Whence those Salian or Sibylline words, or those fetched from the Sabines away from Cures?
which, the masters for the most part keeping silent, some fecial priest, or flamen, or drowsy riddler of legal questions would more readily disclose. We have brought forth our little works in a style dry, thin, certainly for the greatest part common: whose honor is therefore rare, because its use is frequent; whose favor is therefore difficult, because its discovery is easy. Indeed I profess boldly, that just as here there is nothing sharp, nothing eloquent, so there is nothing set down that is not from a model. But why these things at greater length? My diction (which suffices for me) pleases my friends. In whom, however, I embrace either alternative, whether they do not deceive in the weighing, or are deceived by affection: and I beseech God for the rest, in time to come, that posterity may either be deceived likewise, or judge favorably. Farewell. LETTER ONE.
Sidonius to his friend Firminus, greeting. You demand, my lord son, that, the boundary of the earlier letters having been broken through, our pen should run out into further reaches, not content to be shut in by the privilege of the aforesaid number. You add also the reasons why this ninth book should be added to the eight foregoing volumes: namely because Gaius Secundus (Pliny), whose bereavement you pronounce that we follow in this work, ends his epistolary work with equal titles. What you command is not improbable: although even this very thing which you piously enjoin proves arduous, and not opportune to a praise, however small, already once obtained. First, because to a little work already published there is a late conjunction of the present increase;
then because, before any arbiters whatsoever, unless we are mistaken, it is most unseemly that of a single subject-matter there be found a single beginning but triple epilogues. Likewise—and I know not how it could in any way be made pardonable—that our garrulity does not suffer itself to be restrained even after the announced terminus; unless perhaps because the limit which cannot be set to pages cannot be set to friendships either. Wherefore it befits you to be, as it were, in a certain watchtower for guarding my reputation, and to make manifest to the curious the reason of this deed: and to lay open to me, by very frequent rescript, whatever the best men think about this. Furthermore, if, when I have been compelled to prate, you yourself persist in keeping silent, it is not too unjust that you also be punished in turn by the withdrawal of our silence.
Therefore do you first, above all, pardon the business you impose, and the ministry. But we, if any exemplar should come to hand, will quickly add it to the margins of the eighth book: and if your Apollinaris—who has zeal in other matters, but in this one certainly most negligent: as one who is held by very little of reading, whether under compulsion or of his own will: yet, as far as it seems to me, one who would not refuse to be joined to those fathers by whose zeal, wish, and fear something praiseworthy in their sons, though it be persuaded with difficulty, is with greater difficulty sufficient. Farewell. LETTER II. Sidonius to the lord bishop Euphronius, greeting.
The bishop Albiso and Proculus the deacon—for that reason to be pronounced masters of morals to us, because they deserve to be your disciples—delivered letters, with whose sacrosanct address you gave me a gift; which letters, however, impose upon us very much of honor, but more of burden. Whence I both so rejoice at their benediction, that I am confounded by their injunction: as one who, wholly disturbed, or in part, do not obey. For you command things as diverse as they are minute: and you decree that a work be unfolded which is completed by my slenderness with as much difficulty as it is impudently begun. But if I rightly measure the greatness of a tried piety in you, you have labored more that the affection of your heart, than the effect of our work, might be published.
For when Jerome the interpreter, Augustine the dialectician, Origen the allegorist bring forth for you the pregnant ears of spiritual senses by the wholesome harvest of doctrine, will not then, forsooth, on my part, the dry stubble of a fasting tongue crackle for you? In this manner would you rightly have associated with swan-songs the hoarse geese, and with the modulated laments of nightingales the twittering murmurs of worthless sparrows. What of this, that it would also be done arrogantly and unbecomingly, if I should undertake the weight of the enjoined task—a new cleric, an old sinner, of light knowledge, of heavy conscience? namely, so that if I sent any writing whithersoever, my person would not even then be absent from the laughter of the judges, when it had been absent from their sight.
Do not, I beseech, lord bishop, too much exact that my modesty, howsoever it lurks, be disfigured by the rashness of this undertaken work: because so great is the envy of detractors, that the subject-matter which you send would sooner obtain reproach when begun than approval when finished. Deign to be mindful of us, lord bishop. LETTER III. Sidonius to the lord bishop Faustus, greeting. Both your eloquence and your piety preserve their custom; and on this account we receive with grandeur the utterance, because you write eloquently, and the affection, because willingly.
But for the present, pardon having first been sought and obtained, I deem it most cautious and most wholesome—especially through these cities which, being much separated by their situation, act as strangers, while the roads are suspect from the movements of the peoples—to renounce a too frequent style, and, the mutual assiduity of converse being deferred for a while, to take up rather the care of keeping silent. Which thing, among persons bound by affection acting as intermediary, however most harsh and most bitter it be, is nonetheless not brought about by any causes whatsoever, but by very many, sure and necessary ones, which proceed from diverse origins. Of which this shall be numbered with the first reckoning: that the tablet-bearer by no means passes the guards of the public embankments unquestioned:
who, even if he suffers nothing of danger, as being free from crime, yet is wont to endure very much of difficulty; while a vigilant explorer tracks out every secret of the couriers. Of whom if perchance the answer, however little, has trembled at the questions put, the things which are not found written are believed to be commissions: and through this he who is sent generally sustains injury; he who sends, ill-will: and more so in this time, in which the treaties of the kingdoms formerly established between rivals mutually contending are again rendered doubtful through discordant conditions. Besides this, our very mind lies wounded by domestic losses on this side and that. For, through the semblance of duty or (what is truer) necessity, driven from my father's soil alone, here banished, in various directions everywhere...
I am broken by these crashing troubles, since here I suffer the hardships of an exile and there the losses of one proscribed. And so, when I am pressed to send off letters of somewhat finer polish, I am either summoned at an unseasonable time or set to the work shamelessly; for to weave together words either witty in jest or refined in style is the mark of happy men. Moreover, it is a certain barbarism of character for the speech to be merry while the mind is stricken. Rather, endow a soul ill at ease with its own conscience, one that trembles hour by hour at the recollection of the debts of a penal life, with those most frequent and most powerful suffrages of your intercessions, you who are skilled in prayer.
—that wool, which you have carried over from the wrestling-school of the hermit community and from the senate of the cell-dwelling monks of Lérins even into the city whose Church's holy things you now oversee, in no way changed from abbot into priest: since from the attainment of your new dignity you have in no way relaxed the rigour of the old discipline. Obtain therefore, as I said above, by your most effective prayers, that the Lord may be our portion; and that, enrolled among the ranks of our fellow-tribesmen the Levites, we may not remain earthly, we for whom no earth remains; and that we may begin to be pilgrims away from the world's gains as also from its faults. The third cause, indeed the greatest, why I have refrained from writing to you, is this:
that I stand in vast awe of that figured and tropological manner of composition in you, and, most eminent for words polished in every direction, which your letter that I received displays. For although I have as a hoarse applauder heard your discourses, now delivered on the spur of the moment, now elaborated when reason demanded—chiefly then, when at the weekly festivities of the dedication of the church of Lyons you were entreated by the request of your most holy colleagues to deliver the sermon: there we thronged about you as you held forth on something midway between the spiritual and the forensic rules, since you were most learned in both disciplines alike, with our minds erect and our ears bent low, being on this account little satisfied in our desire because you had satisfied our judgment.
For these reasons I have tempered my style and, by tempering it, spoken briefly that I may obey, meaning to keep long silence that I may learn. It is henceforth your part, my lord bishop, of saving and singular doctrine, to devote yourself to works that will endure. For whoever listens to you teaching and disputing learns rather to speak more than to do praiseworthy things. But now, as for what remains, grant your pardon to this rustic page that yields obedience to you: in which page, by my own admission, if it be compared with your letters, there dwells a most infantile style. But to what end do I, dullard, allege these things? For to make too much apology for the very follies is itself the most foolish thing: things in which you are the sole arbiter; if you unstitch me not fully to the very penny, you will laugh at very many, and blame yet more.
But I embrace this too: if, out of the charity in which you excel, you are not everywhere and always most sparing in your judgment; that is, if your verdict should cancel out something over these jottings. For then I shall rejoice more surely that you have approved the rest, if I learn that you have crossed out some parts. Deign to be mindful of me, my lord bishop. LETTER IV. Sidonius to his lord bishop Graecus, greeting. Our wayfarer and letter-carrier wears down the ruts of the accustomed journey, retreading often the stretch of road and the regions that separate our towns. Wherefore it befits us also to pursue the offices of diligence once undertaken: which offices, both with the other travellers and above all when Amantius runs between us, we ought to double with a certain intentness of mind:
lest perchance he himself seem to demand letters out of habit more than we to compose them out of love. Therefore, my lord bishop, be more mindful of your own people, among whom we presume to be counted; who, just as we are lifted up by your prosperity, so are we cast down by your adversities. For the fact that lately you endured many anguishes through the necessity of certain of the brethren has reached us, weeping, by a tearful report. But you, flower of priests, gem of pontiffs, strong in knowledge, stronger in conscience, spurn the threats and waves of worldly storms: for you yourself have often taught that men come to the promised banquets of the patriarchs, or to the nectar of the heavenly cups, through the goblets of earthly bitternesses. Willy-nilly,
whoever wins the kingdom of the despised Mediator, follows his example. However great the bowls of anxieties the affliction of the present may hold out to us, we bear but small things, if we remember what He drank at the gibbet, who invites us to heaven. Deign to be mindful of me, my lord bishop. LETTER V. Sidonius to his lord bishop Julianus, greeting. Although we dwell in seats somewhat more separated, perhaps, than the common wish desired, yet our diligence would not be hindered, as far as concerns the discharge of duty, by the barrier of the intervening road, were we not, divided by kingdoms, called back from the intercourse of more frequent speech by the law of our differing lots:
but now at least, after the making of a peace-pact, since men will be leagued in faithful hearts, our little pages will begin to pass to and fro frequently, since they cease to be objects of suspicion. Accordingly, my lord bishop, together with your most holy brethren join your prayers, likewise to entreat Christ: that, deigning to prosper what we do and tempering the quarrels of our dominion, restraining arms, He may endow those men with innocence, us with quiet, and all with security. Deign to be mindful of me, my lord bishop. LETTER VI. Sidonius to his lord bishop Ambrosius, greeting. On behalf of our most beloved friend (why should I speak the name, the person? You will recognize it all) your holiness prevailed with Christ by the effect of your intercession:
of whose youthful pliability you often used to complain, now openly before summoned witnesses, now groaning in silence. So then, very lately, having broken off cohabitation with a most shameful serving-maid, to whom, joined by obscene familiarity, he had wholly given himself over, he took counsel for his patrimony, his descendants, and his good name by a sudden self-correction. For, emptied out by the losses of his household estate, as soon as he began to understand and to reconsider how much of his ancestral and paternal little goods the extravagance of the domestic Charybdis had licked away; though coming to his senses late, yet at length, as it were, he champed the reins and shook his neck free, and, fixing (as they say) Ulyssean wax in his ears, he fled, deaf against the vices, and rejected the blandishments of shipwreck:
and, as was fitting, this praiseworthy man took to wife a maiden untouched, as noble in character and birth as she was of principal fortune. It would indeed be a glory, had he so abandoned his pleasures that he should not even be joined to a wife. But even if it should perchance befall a man to migrate from error to good morals, it belongs to few to begin from the greatest matters; and to those who long indulged themselves in everything, straightway to renounce the whole all at once. Wherefore it is your part, by assiduous prayer, to obtain as soon as possible for the couple the hope of children: and thereafter it will follow that, once one child or another is begotten (and I have said too much), he who presumed upon unlawful things may henceforth abstain even from lawful ones.
For indeed the spouses themselves, though but newly wed, conduct themselves with such modest and chaste ways, that you would truly recognize, if once you saw them, how very greatly that most honourable conjugal love differs from the figments and enticements of concubinage. Deign to be mindful of me, my lord bishop. LETTER VII. Sidonius to his lord bishop Remigius, greeting. A certain man, journeying from Auvergne to Belgica (the person is known to me, the cause unknown, and it matters not), after he had come to Rheims, cheated your scribe, or bookseller, whether won over by a price or a service, willy-nilly, of a most copious draft of your declamations.
He, returning to us and exceedingly boastful, since so many volumes had been obtained, offered up as a gift whatever he had brought, though we were ready to buy it (which nevertheless would not have been unjust to either party). To run through it was for me a matter of the instant, and, since we who are students were deservedly eager to read, our care was to hold very much in memory and to transcribe the whole. By everyone's agreement it was pronounced that nowadays few things like it can be composed. For rare or none is he for whom, as he meditates, there stands ready an equal ordering by topics, arrangement by letters, composition by syllables. To this add fitness in examples, faithfulness in testimonies, propriety in epithets, urbanity in figures, force in arguments, weight in sentiments, a river in words, a thunderbolt in the clausulae.
The structure, indeed, is twisted yet firm, its most elegant connectives linked by indissoluble caesuras; yet none the less for this is it smooth and light, and in every way rounded off: such as decently speeds the reader's tongue on unhindered, lest, having suffered rugged joinings, it stammer as it is rolled about within the vault of the palate. In short, the whole is utterly liquid and ductile, as when a finger glides over crystalline crusts, or over onyx, with no nail driven in: for indeed, if nothing caught upon chinky obstacles should delay it with a tenacious fracture. What need of more? There exists at present no oration of any living man which your skill could not, and not without effort, surpass and go beyond.
Whence I even almost suspect, my lord bishop, that on account of your overflowing and ineffable eloquence (be the saying pardoned) you are grown proud. But although you shine with the good of a clear conscience, as also of a most orderly diction, we nevertheless are by no means to be shunned by you, we who praise things well written, even if we do not write things worthy of praise. Wherefore cease henceforth to decline our judgments, which threaten nothing biting and nothing reproachful. Otherwise, if you delay to make our barrenness fruitful with your eloquent conversings, we shall lie in wait for the markets of thieves; and of your own accord, with us conniving and suborning, the cunning hand of housebreakers shall plunder your caskets: and you will then begin, plundered by theft, to be moved in vain, if now, being asked, you are not moved by duty.
Deign to be mindful of me, my lord bishop. LETTER VIII. Sidonius to his lord bishop Principius, greeting. Although we were not expecting, yet were desiring, it, an old carrier delivered your letter, found suitable to be entrusted with duties rightly repeated, since he discharged the first so well. Therefore, endowed with a second address, or rather with a benediction, I too repeat another 'greeting,' combining my services, equalled in number, not in merits. And because, my lord bishop, we now live in regions joined and yet disjoined, and are hindered from enjoying mutual sight by the situation of our separated dwelling;
pray that, having passed through the anguishes and burden of the present way by a desirable and religious departure, when the holy day of judgment shall have shone forth, we may be joined—destined to serve your ranks at the resurrection, or under the pretext of a Gibeonite servitude; for, according to the heavenly promises which pledged that the sons of faith should be gathered from the nations, if pardon console us who are guilty, while glory awaits you who are blessed, then, even if we be divided by the difference of our deeds, yet we shall not be divided by the distance of places. Deign to be mindful of me, my lord bishop. LETTER IX. Sidonius to his lord bishop Faustus, greeting. You have complained in common, most sacred man, that we keep too long a silence: I acknowledge the zeal of your side herein; the guilt of ours I do not acknowledge.