Collected Works 24 part 2/5

A faithful man perishes, therefore, when he has slipped away into the spectacle of the charioteer's frenzy and the gladiator's blood and the stage's foulness and the wrestling-school's vanity; into games, into the banquets of secular festivity; if he has applied some arts of curiosity to the service, to the ministry of another's idolatry; if he has dashed into a word of ambiguous denial or of blasphemy. For some such thing he is put outside the flock — or he himself perhaps by anger, by swelling pride, by rivalry (which indeed often happens), by disdain of chastisement has broken away. He ought to be sought and recalled. That which can be recovered does not perish, unless it has persevered outside. Thou wilt rightly interpret the parable, recalling a sinner still living.

But the adulterer and fornicator — who will not pronounce him dead immediately upon the commission? With what face wilt thou restore a dead man to the flock on the authority of that parable, which recalls not a dead beast? In short, if thou rememberest the prophets, where the shepherds are rebuked — I think it is the voice of Ezekiel: 'Shepherds, behold, ye devour the milk and clothe yourselves with the wool; what is strong ye have slain, what is weak ye have not cured, what is broken ye have not bound up, what was driven away ye have not brought back, what perished ye have not sought.' Does He reproach also concerning the dead, that they had not taken care to restore even that to the flock?

Plainly He urges that they have made the sheep perish and be devoured by the beasts of the field — sheep which can neither perish unto death nor be devoured, if they are not abandoned — not that those which perished unto death and were devoured should be taken up again. According to the example of the drachma too, even within the house of God, the Church, there may be some offences, middling according to the measure and weight of the drachma itself, which, lying hidden there, and soon found there, are straightway there transacted with the joy of amendment. But of adultery and fornication the token is not a drachma but a talent, for the seeking out of which there is need not of the point of a lamp, but of the lance of the whole sun.

As soon as the sin has appeared, straightway the man is expelled from the Church, nor does he remain there, nor does he bring joy to the Church that finds him, but grief; nor does he call forth the congratulation of the neighbouring brotherhoods, but the sorrow of those nearest. And so, this interpretation of ours being joined in conflict with theirs, the arguments both of the sheep and of the drachma will look the more toward the heathen, inasmuch as they cannot apply to a Christian of that offence for which they are forced to be applied to the Christian from the opposite side. VIII. But indeed the same outcome deceives most interpreters of the parables which very often happens in shading purple upon garments.

When thou shalt have thought that thou hast rightly harmonized the tempering of the colours, and believed that their combinations loved one another, presently, when each mass is refined and the highlights brought out, the difference, when displayed, will vomit forth all the error. So too, by the same mist, concerning the parable of the two sons, while for the moment certain figures colour alike for some, they wander from the true light of that comparison which the material of the parable holds forth. For they place two peoples in the two sons — the Jewish the elder, the Christian the younger. For they cannot then arrange that the Christian sinner in the younger son will obtain pardon, unless they have expressed the Jewish people in the elder.

Further, if I shall have shown the Jewish people to fall short of the comparison of the elder son, consequently the Christian too will assuredly not be admitted from the figuring of the younger son. For although the Jew too may be called a son and the elder, because prior in adoption; although he may also envy the Christian the reconciliation of God the Father — which especially the opposite party seizes upon — yet the saying to the father will not be the Jew's: 'Behold, how many years do I serve thee, and I have never transgressed thy precept.' For when was the Jew not a transgressor of the law, hearing with the ear and not hearing, holding in hatred him who exposed wrong in the gates, and with scorn the holy word? So neither will the father's voice be addressed to the Jew: 'Thou art always with me, and all that is mine is thine.'

For the Jews are pronounced to be apostate sons, begotten indeed and raised on high, yet who have not reckoned with God, who have forsaken the Lord and provoked to wrath the Holy One of Israel. We shall say that everything has plainly been granted to the Jew, from whom even the more agreeable condition, and whatever concerns his appetite, has been snatched away, to say nothing of the very land of the fathers' promise. And so, no less today the Jew than the younger son, having squandered the substance of God, begs in a foreign land, serving even to this day its princes—that is, the princes of this present age. Let Christians therefore seek elsewhere for this brother of theirs; for the parable does not admit the Jew.

Far more fittingly would they have matched the Christian to the elder and the Jew to the younger son, according to the comparison of faith, if the order of the two peoples—marked out from Rebecca's womb—permitted such a reversal. Except that the conclusion too would work against it. For it will be fitting that the Christian rejoice, and not grieve, over the Jew's restoration, seeing that our whole hope is bound up with the remaining expectation of Israel. Thus, even if in certain points they succeed, yet in others, being wise to the contrary, the equating of the examples is undone. And even if everything could correspond as in a mirror, there is one chief peril in interpretations: that the readiness of comparisons be not adjusted to some other end than that to which the subject-matter of each parable has assigned it.

For we remember that stage-players too, when they fit allegorical gestures to their songs, express things far removed from the present—from the plot, the scene, the character—and yet do so most aptly. But let their extraordinary skill look to itself: it is nothing to the point (nothing 'to Andromache'). So too the heretics assign the same parables to whatever they wish, not to what they ought. Most aptly do they exclude—why 'most aptly'? Because from the very beginning they framed the very subject-matter of their doctrines to suit the openings the parables afforded. Doubtless it was open to them, unbound as they are from the rule of truth, to hunt out and compose those things of which the parables seem to speak. IX.

We, however, since we do not contrive subject-matters out of parables, but interpret parables out of their subject-matters, and do not greatly labor to wrench everything in our exposition—so long as we guard against whatever is contrary—do not ask: Why a hundred sheep? And why exactly ten drachmas? And what of those brooms? It was necessary that one who wished to express how most acceptable to God is the salvation of a single sinner should name some quantity of number, out of which he might describe one indeed as lost; it was necessary that the manner of the woman seeking the drachma in the house be furnished with the help both of brooms and of a lamp. For curiosities of this kind both render certain things suspect and, by the subtlety of forced expositions, generally lead away from the truth.

There are, moreover, things set down quite simply for the building up, arranging, and weaving together of a parable, so that men may be led to that end for which the illustration is provided. And the two sons will certainly look to that same end to which both the drachma and the sheep look. For with those things to which they cohere they have the same occasion—namely, the same murmuring of the Pharisees at the Lord's dealings with the heathen. Or if anyone doubts that the publicans among the Jews were heathen—their land having long since been usurped by the hand of Pompey and Lucullus—let him read Deuteronomy: 'There shall be no tribute-payer from among the sons of Israel.' Nor would the name of publicans be so execrable before the Lord, were it not the name of outsiders who sold passage over His own heaven and earth and sea.

But when He joins 'sinners' to the publicans, He does not thereby show them to be Jews, though some of them could have been. Rather, He distinguished a single class of heathen by setting them side by side: some sinners by office—that is, publicans—others by nature—that is, non-publicans. For the rest, He would not have been reproached for sharing food with Jews, but with heathen, whose table Jewish discipline forbids. Now concerning the prodigal son, this first must be considered, as more useful: for the equating of examples will not be admitted—however most fitting on the surface—if it prove most harmful to salvation. And we see the whole state of salvation, established as it is in the tenor of discipline, overturned by that interpretation which is affected from the opposite side.

For if it is the Christian who—having received from God the Father the substance of baptism, of the Holy Spirit, and thereafter of eternal hope—strays far from the Father and squanders it, living as a heathen; if, stripped of the goods of the mind, he has handed over his service even to the prince of this age (and to whom else than the devil?), and, set by him to feed swine—that is, to tend unclean spirits—came to himself and returned to the Father: then no longer will adulterers and fornicators, but idolaters and blasphemers and deniers and every kind of apostate satisfy the Father by this parable, and truly, in this fashion all the more, the whole substance of the sacrament is shattered. For who will fear to squander what he will afterward recover? Who will care to preserve forever what he cannot forever lose?

Security in sin is itself a lust for sin. The apostate too, then, will recover his former robe, the garment of the Holy Spirit, and the ring anew, the seal of the washing; and Christ will be slain for him again, and he will recline on that couch from which those unworthily clothed are wont to be taken up by the torturers and cast into the darkness—much more, then, those wholly stripped. It is therefore too much—if indeed it is not even fitting—to make the order of the prodigal son apply to the Christian. But if the image of the son does not fully coincide even with the Jew, then the interpretation shall be steered simply toward the Lord's own purpose. The Lord had come, assuredly, to save that which had perished, being a physician more needful to the sick than to the whole. This He both figured in parables and proclaimed in His sayings.

Who among men perishes, who falls from health, save he who knows not God? Who is safe and sound, save he who knows God? These two kinds, brothers by their common kind, this parable too will signify. See whether the heathen has any substance in God the Father—the substance of endowment, of wisdom, of a natural knowledge toward God—through which even the Apostle notes that, 'in the wisdom of God the world by its wisdom knew not God,' which wisdom it had assuredly received from God. This substance, then, he squandered far from the Lord, cast by his conduct amid the errors and enticements and lusts of the age, where, driven by hunger for the truth, he handed himself over to the prince of this present age.

That one set him over the swine (that he might feed that herd familiar to demons), where neither was there any life-giving food for him, and where at the same time he saw others abounding in heavenly bread amid the divine work. He remembers God the Father, and having made satisfaction he returns; he receives his former robe—namely, that state which Adam had lost by transgression. The ring too he receives then for the first time, wherewith, being questioned, he seals the covenant of faith; and so from that point he feeds upon the richness of the Lord's body—the Eucharist, that is. This will be the prodigal son, who was never before thrifty, who was at once prodigal, because he was not at once a Christian. Him too the Pharisees, as he returned from the world to the Father's embrace, bewailed among publicans and sinners.

And therefore it is only to this that the elder brother's envy is fitted: not because the Jews were innocent and obedient to God, but because they begrudged the nations their salvation—those very ones, plainly, who ought always to have been at the Father's side. And assuredly the Jew groans at the Christian's very first calling, not at his second restoration. For the first shines out even to the heathen, but the second—which is transacted in the churches—is not even known to the Jews. I think that I have rendered interpretations better fitted both to the subject-matter of the parables, and to the congruity of things, and to the safeguarding of the disciplines.

But if in this the opposing party is eager to configure the sheep, the drachma, and the son's riotous living to the Christian sinner—so that they may grant adultery and fornication a place in penitence—then either the rest of the capital offenses will have to be conceded equally, or else adultery and fornication, being their equals, will likewise have to be kept unpardonable. But it is too much, since nothing else may be argued beyond the matter that was being treated. Finally, if it were permitted to transfer parables elsewhere, we would rather direct their hope toward martyrdom, which alone can restore the son when all his substance has been squandered, and which will proclaim with joy the drachma found among all things—even in the dung—and which will bring back on the very shoulders of the Lord into the flock the sheep that fled through every rough and precipitous place.

But we prefer, in the Scriptures, to know less, if perchance, rather than to know contrary to them. Accordingly, we ought to guard both the Lord's meaning and His precept. Transgression in interpretation is no lighter than in conduct. X.

Having thus shaken off the yoke by directing these parables against the heathen, and having once discerned or accepted the necessity of interpreting them no otherwise than the subject of the proposal demands, they now contend that even the proclamation of penitence does not befit the heathen, whose offenses are not liable to it, being imputable, forsooth, to ignorance, which nature alone makes guilty before God. Nor, they say, do those savor of remedies who do not savor of the perils themselves; whereas the rationale of penitence holds good there where sin is committed with conscience and will, where both fault has its savor and grace its own—where he mourns, he rolls in the dust, who knows both what he has lost and what he is to recover, if he offers up penitence to God, who assuredly offers it to sons rather than to strangers.

Did Jonah, then, on this account think penitence unnecessary for the heathen Ninevites, when he cavilled at the office of preaching? Or rather, foreseeing God's mercy poured out even upon strangers, did he fear that it would, as it were, undo his proclamation? And was it not indeed for the sake of a profane city, not yet sharing in God, still sinning in ignorance, that the prophet almost perished? Except that he suffered as a type of the Lord's Passion, which was to redeem the penitent heathen as well. Well too that John, making straight the ways of the Lord, was a herald of penitence no less to soldiers and publicans than to the sons of Abraham. The Lord Himself presumed penitence upon the Sidonians and Tyrians, had they but seen the proofs of His mighty works.

Nay, I will contend that penitence befits natural sinners more than voluntary ones. For he who has not yet used it will more deserve its fruit than he who has already both used and abused it, and the first remedies will savor more than the outworn. Doubtless the Lord is kinder to the ungrateful than to the ignorant, and more swiftly merciful to the reprobate than to those not yet proved—so that He is not angered by insults to His clemency rather than soothed, and does not more gladly impart it to strangers than to the sons in whom He has lost it—since He has thus adopted the Gentiles, while the Jews make sport of His patience. But this is what the psychici will have: that God, the just judge, prefers the penitence of the sinner to his death—that sinner who preferred death to penitence. But if that is so, then by sinning we earn merit! «

Come now, you tightrope-walker of modesty and chastity and all holiness concerning sex, who tread the very thinnest thread of such a discipline with a foot poised upon the true path away from the true—balancing the flesh by the spirit, steadying the soul by faith, tempering the eye by fear! Why then do you stand wholly on the rope? You will go on—if you can, if you will—so long as you are secure and, as it were, on solid ground. For if any wavering of the flesh, any distraction of the mind, any wandering of the eye should knock you from your course, God is good. To His own, not to the heathen, He offers His bosom; a second penitence will receive you; from an adulterer you will again become a Christian. » This is what you tell me, most benignant interpreter of God! But I would yield to you, if the Scripture «

Scripture of the Shepherd », which alone loves adulterers, had deserved to be inscribed in the divine instrument—if it were not judged, by every council of the churches, even your own, to be among the apocryphal and false, itself adulterous and thence a patroness of its fellows, by which you are initiated in other things as well; for whom, if perchance, that Shepherd will be advocate whom you depict on your cup, himself a prostitutor of the Christian sacrament, deservedly both an idol of drunkenness and a refuge of the adultery that follows after the cup—of which you would drink nothing more gladly than the sheep of the second penitence. But I draw from the Scripture of that Shepherd who cannot be broken. This straightway John offers me, saying, with the washing and office of penitence:

'Bring forth fruits worthy of penitence, and say not, We have Abraham for our father'—lest, that is, they should again take up flatteries of their delinquency from the grace of the fathers—'for God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.' So it follows for us too, that they who hitherto sin should bring forth fruit worthy of penitence. For what ripens from penitence but the effect of amendment? But even if pardon is rather the fruit of penitence, this too cannot stand without a ceasing from sin. Thus the ceasing from sin is the root of pardon, so that pardon may be the fruit of penitence. XI. Thereafter, as regards the Gospel, the question of the parables has now been discussed.

But if the Lord also by His deeds put forth something of this sort on behalf of sinners—as when He permits even the touch of His own body to the sinful woman who washes His feet with tears, wipes them with her hair, and by the ointment inaugurates His own burial; or as when to the Samaritan woman, now in her sixth marriage, not an adulteress but a prostitute, He even showed—what He easily showed to no one—who He was: from this nothing is contributed to our adversaries, even if He had then already granted Christians pardon of their offenses. For now we say: this is lawful to the Lord alone; today let the power of His indulgence operate. But as to those times in which He acted on earth, this we define: it prejudices nothing against us, if pardon was conferred even upon Jewish sinners.

For Christian discipline is reckoned from the renewal of the covenant and—as we premised—from the redemption of the flesh, that is, the Lord's Passion. No one was perfect before the order of faith was discovered; no one a Christian before Christ was taken back into heaven; no one holy before the Holy Spirit was made present from heaven, the determiner of that very discipline. XII. And so let these men—who received another Paraclete in and through the apostles, whom they now possess neither as acknowledged in their own prophets nor in the apostles—now teach, at least from the apostolic instrument, that the stains of the flesh besmirched after baptism can be washed away by penitence.

We, in the apostles also, discern the form of the old law dissolved as a demonstration of how great a thing adultery is—lest perchance it be reckoned milder under the newness of the disciplines than under their antiquity. When first the Gospel thundered and shook the old things, so that there was dispute about the necessity of retaining the law, first this rule the apostles, on the authority of the Holy Spirit, sent forth to those who had begun already to be gathered from the nations: 'It seemed good,' they say, 'to the Holy Spirit and to us, to lay upon you no further burden than of those things from which it is necessary to abstain: from things sacrificed to idols, and from fornications, and from blood; from which observing, you will do rightly, the Holy Spirit forbidding you.'

It suffices here too that a place of its own honor has been reserved for adultery and fornication, between idolatry and homicide. For by 'blood' we shall understand human blood all the more forbidden. Furthermore, of what sort do the apostles wish those crimes to be seen, which alone they cull out for observance from the former law, which alone they prescribe as necessarily to be abstained from? Not that they permit the others, but that they set these alone in the foreground as by no means remissible—they who, for the sake of the heathen, made the other burdens of the law remissible. Why, then, do they excuse our neck from so great a yoke, unless to impose upon us always these summaries of discipline? Why do they indulge us so many fetters, unless to bind us perpetually to the more necessary things? They loosed us from many, that we might be obliged to observe the more harmful ones.

The thing was done by way of compensation. We gained much, that we might render some things in return. But a compensation is not revocable—unless, in short, it be revoked by the repetition of adultery, and likewise of blood and of idolatry. For the whole law will then be taken up again, if the condition of pardon be dissolved. But the Holy Spirit did not make His pact with us lightly—indeed He made it unbidden, whereby He is the more to be honored. His pledge no one shall dissolve save the ungrateful. Now He will neither take back what He has remitted, nor remit what He has retained. The status of the newest testament is ever unchangeable, and assuredly the recitation of the decree and that counsel will cease only with the age. He has sufficiently denied pardon to those things whose guardianship He chose; He has claimed as His own the things He has not thus conceded.

Hence it is that peace is restored by the churches neither to idolatry nor to blood. That the apostles fell away from this their own definition, I think, one may not believe; or if some can believe it, they will have to prove it. XIII. We know full well their suspicions here too. For in truth they suspect that the Apostle Paul, in the second Epistle to the Corinthians, granted pardon to the same fornicator whom in the first he had pronounced to be delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh—the impious heir of his father as regards the marriage—as though he had afterward turned his stylus, writing: 'But if any has caused grief, he has not grieved me, but in part—that I burden not you all. Sufficient is such a rebuke as is inflicted by many;'

'so that, on the contrary, you should rather forgive and comfort him, lest perhaps such a one be swallowed up by overmuch sorrow. Wherefore I beseech you, that you confirm your love toward him. For to this end also I wrote, that I might know the proof of you, whether in all things you are obedient to me. But to whom you forgive anything, I also; for if I too have forgiven anything, I have forgiven it in the person of Christ, that we be not defrauded by Satan, since we are not ignorant of his devices.' What here is understood concerning the fornicator, concerning the defiler of his father's bed, concerning the Christian who surpassed the shamelessness of the heathen—since he would accordingly have absolved by a special pardon the very one he had condemned by a special wrath? He shows mercy more obscurely than he shows indignation. He is more open in severity than in leniency.

And yet anger is more readily oblique than indulgence. Sadder things hang back more than gladder ones. It was, forsooth, a modest indulgence that was in question—which, if it were now to be appraised, seeing that the very greatest things are not wont to be granted even without proclamation, so much the less is it granted without any indication. And you indeed, leading the adulterer's penitence into the church to entreat the brotherhood, prostrate in the midst—clad in sackcloth and ashes, composed with disgrace and horror—him who persuades all to tears, who licks the footprints of all, who clasps the knees of all; and upon such an exit of the man you, good shepherd and blessed pope, hold forth with all the enticements of mercy you can, and in the parable of the sheep do you seek your she-goats?

Lest your sheep leap out of the flock again (as though from that point onward what was not lawful even once were now permitted), you fill the rest also with fear, precisely when you are being most indulgent. But would the Apostle so recklessly have pardoned the wicked lust of a fornication laden with incest, that he did not exact from him even this at least—the appointed habit of penitence, which you ought to have learned from him himself? Would he have uttered no threat about the future, addressed nothing about the rest? Nay, rather, he even further beseeches that they confirm their love toward him—as one making satisfaction, not as one pardoning. And yet I hear of love, not of communion. As also to the Thessalonians:

'But if any obeys not our word by the epistle, note that man, that you keep no company with him, that he may be ashamed—not counting him as an enemy, but rebuking him as a brother.' So plainly could he have said that to the fornicator love only was granted, and not communion as well; but to the incestuous man not even love—him whom, forsooth, he had commanded to be taken away out of their midst, and much more, assuredly, out of their affection. But he feared lest they be defrauded by Satan as to the loss of that person whom he himself had cast out to Satan, or lest he be swallowed up by abundance of grief—he whom he had consigned to the destruction of the flesh.

Here now they interpret the destruction of the flesh as an office of penitence—as though it might, by fastings and filth and every kind of neglect and deliberate ill-treatment, make sufficient satisfaction to God by wearing the flesh away; so that from this they may argue that the fornicator, or rather that incestuous man, was delivered by the Apostle not to the perdition of Satan, but to his amendment, as though afterward, on account of the destruction—that is, the affliction—of the flesh, he was to obtain pardon, and therefore did obtain it. Plainly the same Apostle delivered Hymenaeus and Alexander to Satan, that they might be taught not to blaspheme, as he writes to his Timothy. But he also says that there was given to him a stake, an angel of Satan, by whom he was buffeted, lest he exalt himself.

If they touch on this too—that we should understand those delivered to Satan by him to have been given over to amendment, not to perdition—what likeness is there between blasphemy and incest, and a soul untouched by these, indeed raised up from no other source than the highest sanctity and utter innocence, which in the Apostle was restrained by buffetings, if perchance, through pain (as they say) of the ear or the head? But incest and blasphemy deserved to hand over whole men into the possession of Satan himself, not of his angel. And on this too there is a difference—nay, to this it makes the greatest difference—that we read those to have been delivered by the Apostle to Satan, but to the Apostle an angel of Satan to have been given. Finally, when Paul entreats the Lord, what does he hear? 'Hold my grace sufficient, for strength is perfected in weakness.'

This, those who are delivered to Satan cannot hear. But if the crime of Hymenaeus and Alexander is irremissible both in this age and in the age to come—blasphemy, that is—then assuredly the Apostle would not, against the Lord's own bounds, have delivered under hope of pardon to Satan men already plunged from faith into blasphemy. Whence too he pronounced them shipwrecked as regards the faith, no longer having the solace of the ship of the Church. For to those pardon is denied who from faith have dashed themselves upon blasphemy. But heathen and heretics daily emerge from blasphemy. And even if he said, 'I have delivered them to Satan, that they might receive the discipline of not blaspheming,' he said it of the rest, who, when those had been delivered to Satan—that is, cast outside the Church—were to be instructed that there must be no blaspheming.