Tractates 1 part 4/14

nor is he checked even by the voice of Him who restrains him, but presses on more and more, until by the shedding of blood the guilt conceived is doubled. The empty world marvels that it is too narrow for two. We marvel that the elements suffer a man — who was made to the image and likeness of God — to be slain, and this by his brother. The raw earth blushes, profaned with pious blood. Cain alone, unhappy, exults, and because he lacks a witness, thinks he has lacked the crime: he whom God saw, whom conscience reproves, whom his brother's blood accuses. What of the impatient men of Sodom? Where men were unlawfully oppressed by men, the divine fire shall kindle the fire of monstrous lust;

and the compact of that unnatural wickedness — whereby, more wretched than those they subdued, pursuing with the infamous spear, they ravaged the backs of their guests — a rain poured down from heaven by the Lord, armed with flames and brimstone, swept away in a penal storm. The Jews swell up in their assemblies; while they revere the divine altars, they overthrow them; with manifold slaughter they crush the prophets; out of excessive passion they attempt to stone Moses (Exod. 14:10); ever ungrateful, they fight against the Lord with various contrivances, and they long to serve many gods and kings — they who through impatience could in no wise serve the one God. IV. But let examples of impatience have been brought forward thus far; for there is no need, I think, to recount with diligence what one would wish to be restrained;

especially since its nature is such that it never lingers in its own affairs, but is wholly spread abroad in public; it thrives on slanders; surging this way and that, in varied blindness it bursts forth; but it is conquered, if dissimulation should obscure its notoriety. Now let us return to the virtue of patience, which by its illustrious power brought forth for our forefathers perennial glory and salvation. Abel is a martyr because he was just (Matt. 23:35); just because patient; from whom the martyrs learned to suffer, suffering willingly what they do not deserve.

Noah, when God announced that a deluge — by which all flesh should be utterly blotted out — was imminent at every moment, both believes and fears; and the ark, by which he with his own should be saved, which he was commanded to make, he does not fit together with headlong haste; nor does he seize so great a task like a presumptuous or a mad man, but he builds it patiently, patiently adorns it, patiently fills it with various living creatures. When he should be bidden to enter, when to close the door, he patiently awaits; worthy to escape, who, in so great a terror of the world, did not hasten to escape. V. Now I must recount that wondrous trial of Abraham (Gen.

22), which would have made him either sacrilegious, if he should despise God, or cruel, if he should kill his son, had he not, by a certain singular and truly divine patience, tempered the matter between religion and natural affection — not denying to God, in hope, what against hope he had received from God (Rom. 4:18). Therefore Isaac, his most sweet son, a victim sweeter to God, he despises, that he may save; he destines him to the knife, that he may not slay; secure that by that deed he could not displease, which was performed with God as its author. O new spectacle, and truly worthy of God! in which it is hard to determine whether the priest or the victim is the more patient. Neither the colour of the smiter nor of the one to be smitten falters; the limbs are not shaken with trembling; the eyes are neither cast down nor grim.

No one entreats, no one trembles, no one excuses himself, no one is troubled, lest it be truly a slaying of kin. The one carries before himself the wood whereby he is to be burned; the other rears the altar. The one bares the sword, the other his neck, with one vow, one devotion; and lest anything be profane, what is performed by the one is carried out by the other carefully and patiently. Under so great a dread — I will not say of human feeling, but rather of nature itself — they are glad. To this alone does affection yield to piety, piety to religion; and religion favours both. The sword between them stands amazed, suspended with no hindrance, that by a terrible sacrifice it had rendered glory, and not crime. What is this? Behold, savagery passes over into faith, and crime into a sacrament: the slayer of his own blood returns unbloodied, and he who was immolated lives.

Both are a glory to themselves, both an example of brightness, both an admirable testimony of the worship of God for all ages. Happy had the world been, brothers, if all became such slayers of their own blood. VI. Jacob (Gen. 27), through patience, gained both the blessing and his brother: he gives place to wrath, secure, that he may return home; he commends himself to his father, and gently and meekly departs, that he may prove that he both deserved, and did not scheme for, what he deserved. And lest anyone obscure this patience under the name of timidity, in the taking of wives too his condition is of the same sort (Gen. 29). He gladly accepts; he abides the long stretches of time; he gladly endures all his father-in-law's commands — he who, had he been impatient, once circumvented by craft, would never afterward, in time never to be recovered, have served for Rachel.

In like manner Joseph is found to be patient (Genesis 37): patient in the pasture when he is seized by his brothers, patient when he is let down into the pit, patient when he is dragged away with cruel spear, patient in prison, more patient still in the kingdom, and most patient of all when he recognized the brothers he had longed for; and where boastfulness could not have restrained itself, he, set in a place of honor, restrained it. Surely this patience is heavenly, which neither hardship nor prosperity nor affection could move from its settled state. As for the devil set against Job (Job 1 and 2), who is not reported to be gentle, one may judge what he could have devised when provoked;

especially since he had received power from God to strive with whatever weapons and whatever forces he could in the testing of a just man with his inveterate cruelty. And so a new and almost incredible combat is joined. The devil fights beyond his custom, but Job, by feigning indifference, fights the more (Job 1). He scatters in a single moment Job's great and most abundant wealth; and the most flourishing band of his sweet children, by a most savage blow, crushed together beneath the ruin of the falling walls, with excessive cruelty he hastily buries before he slays. Finally Job himself, whom he had stripped of his great riches, he clothes with great ulcers, into which besides he sends forth gnawing worms (Job 2),

so that in the torments of the dying man a foreign wound might be brought to its end by a wound that dwelt within him along with himself. But Job, having routed by his calm endurance all the assaults of the adverse party, mightier within himself beyond measure, recovering for the better all that the war had destroyed, did not by his feigned indifference lose the estate of his former happiness, but exchanged it. Here I dare not call to mind the patience of the Lord, lest God, reckoned among men, should be supposed to suffer some injury: for it is no fitting praise to which a leveling comparison takes away the primacy. But since absolutely all those I have mentioned, and all the blessed, are such by His gift, it is an affront to praise the Lord, whose servant you cannot worthily praise. VIII.

But how I would wish, if I could, O Patience, queen of all things, to celebrate you the more by deeds! For I know that you rest more gladly in your own conduct, your own foundations, and your own counsels than in the bare words of others, and that you place not so great a praise in multiplying virtues as in perfecting them. You watch over virginity, that its flower may by no manner and at no time fade. You are the most faithful harbor of widowhood, set amid the frequent whirlwinds of ever-changing storms. You, like some skilled charioteer, with gentle reins compose those who bend their untried necks beneath the most holy yoke of marriage, to an effort of labor, or of love, that is shared equally.

You have taught friendship to will the same thing and to be unwilling for the same thing. You, the sole and strongest consolation of servitude, often beget liberty. You watch over poverty, that it may possess all things, content with itself, while it endures all things. You called forth the Prophets; you bound the Apostles to Christ. You are the daily mother and crown of the martyrs. You are the wall of faith, the fruit of hope, the friend of charity. You especially gather every people and the divine virtues, as it were poured forth like hairs into the knot of a single crown, into honor and beauty. Happy, and eternally happy, is he who has always kept you within him. TRACTATE VII. On Humility. I.

The wise men of Greece, as they wish to appear, curious beyond the rest, exalted their own heart in a hateful enterprise, beyond what is permitted, with insolent arguments. These men, when they climb up to heaven with words, when they persuade men that God is what they please, when they pretend to know the secrets of nature's workings, when they impose names upon the stars and labors upon the sun, when they ascribe their own errors to a charted circle, when they desire above all that the song of their own genius be honored, thus they have ruined both themselves and others: for under a changed name and worship, as though it had been advanced by their dreams, they handed on those schoolboy slanders against God even into the Church, so that within her too, if it pleases anyone to be mad, God should not be worshiped by him, but merely investigated.

Let us hear what the unbelievers now do, concerning whom let us hear what divine Scripture declares, whose words are these: They have diminished the truth from among the sons of men. They have spoken vain things, every one to his neighbor: with deceitful lips, in their heart they have spoken evil things. May God destroy all deceitful lips, and the tongue that speaks proud things. Who have said: We will magnify our tongue; our lips are our own; who is our Lord (Psalm 11:1ff)? II. The Prophet, shunning this pride of a swollen heart, thus says to the Lord: Lord, my heart is not exalted (Psalm 130:1), since he knows it is written: Man looks upon the face, God upon the heart (1 Samuel 16).

Will it not be thought injurious, or superfluous, to declare to God what He already knows? Far from it: He declares it, yet to us, whom He desires to imitate what He does and proclaims. Therefore he says, My heart is not exalted, teaching that the best sacrifice to God is a contrite heart (Psalm 51:19). Wherefore, brethren, one must not be lifted up by prosperous things, but in the fear of God, within the bounds of meekness, one must be restrained by the bridle of modesty, that we may deservedly merit what Scripture says: The Lord is near to those who are contrite of heart, and He will save the humble in spirit (Psalm 34:18). But hear also what the Lord Himself by His loving promise exhorts us to. Come, He says, you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.

Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me, for I am meek and humble of heart: and you shall find rest for your souls (Matthew 11:28-29). Our God, brethren, is humble of heart, and that ineffable power of His wisdom and might lies hidden within the manhood He has assumed, the more wonderful because He is so great and such as He is. And does curious man exalt his heart, and try to comprehend the height of Him whose humility he does not follow? III. He continues, and says: Neither are my eyes lifted up (Psalm 130:1). The case of the eyes is worse, because exaltation of heart pertains to few, but elation of the eyes to all: concerning whom what John proclaims to the disciples is in common use to all.

Do not, he says, love the world, nor the things that are in the world. If anyone love the world, the charity of the Father is not in him, for all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the ambition of the age (1 John 2:15-16): for by these as authors is conceived, by these as leaders is carried on, by these as ministers is fulfilled, whatever burns daily in the world with concupiscence, ambition, and avarice. Wherefore both are vain: because both the exaltation of the heart finds no fruit, and the elation of the eyes, lifted from one thing to another, whatever it has seen, by its fleeting fickleness at once loses. IV. Thereafter follows: Neither have I walked in great matters, nor in marvels above me (Psalm 131:2). The words of God are great;

He Himself is wonderful in the heights. Since the Prophet was in dangers, if he did not walk in these, how does he assign it to himself besides as a good work to withdraw from those in which he ought to have walked? To the former, brethren, the latter make answer: for he speaks of worldly matters. He says he did not walk in great things and in marvels—not, to be sure, those of God, but in those things that are reckoned great by men in this world. And when he added, Above me, he showed that he had never been lifted up, although he could have been: for none are more easily puffed up than those whom the summit of an unhoped-for honor exalts.

David indeed lay humble, abject, of ignoble standing, in his father's house, ever pasturing the sheep, well-nigh a stranger, an innocent reckoned among the innocent. This man pleased God, was anointed king, was inspired as a prophet: he grows not insolent in the kingdom; he overshadows no one with a prophet's terror; he does not avenge his own injuries by his ardent power; he loves those who hate him; he spares his enemies; he pardons his parricidal sons; his persecutor, and—what is more—a king who had several times been delivered into his hands by God, he chooses ever to fear rather than to slay: thankful by a reversed service, he keeps the gift of God for God, that he may be pleasing. A gentle king, a loving father, a prophet.

a modest one: he can do all things, yet from all he holds himself back; he is not changed by the great and marvelous things of the world; everywhere he keeps himself a meek and humble shepherd. V. After this he added: If I was not humbly minded, but exalted my soul. Let us consider whether perhaps the Prophet attacks himself by exalting his soul, who boasts that he has not exalted his heart. He does not contradict himself, but shows that it belongs to loftiness of soul to have conquered the higher things, because whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted (Matthew 23:12): for the lowering of the soul is an exalted heart, while a restrained heart is the promotion of the soul.

Witnesses of this matter for us are two men setting forth the prophetic song by their own deeds, the Pharisee and the Publican standing in the temple of God (Luke 18). The Pharisee tastelessly stretches out to heaven his hands, which are often the agents of slaughter, often of plunder. He shamelessly lifts up his eyes, by whose allurement the world is wretched. His tongue thunders, which never lacks the venom of the serpent; and—what is greater than all madness—he praises himself to God. But the Publican entreats God not piecemeal but whole, because, washed by fear, he is humble, confessing his own sins, according to the Lord's saying (Matthew 15:19),

from which proceed all kinds of sins (Matthew 15:19), repeatedly striking his breast, in a manner chastising his own heart with his hand in shame, and asking only pardon for his offenses by silence, not by voice. Hear what each of them obtained. He who had promised everything to himself departed empty; he who presumed nothing departed from the temple justified. TRACTATE VIII. On Fear. I. The word of fear, dearly beloved brethren, is indeed one, but when reason is added, fear is distinguished from fear; for there come to be two: one of God, the other which is natural: the natural is born in man, but that of God is both learned and taught: because it consists not in trembling, but in the reasoning of doctrine; as it is written:

Come, children, hear me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord (Psalm 34:11). The natural fear, then, is not learned, but befalls us by the impulse of our own weakness: because it is not a matter of art to fear what you dread; and you dread what you would not have happen to you. It arises in diverse ways: when conscience seethes with some guilt; or when a hostile, threatening hand presses your safety with the sword; or when, reared up for the bite against a traveler's path, kindled with burning scales, the swollen serpent sets itself in his way; or when a beastly rage, aiming at slaughter, attempts to bear down with near roaring upon the back of one fleeing; or when, the helm lost, amid contending waves and blasts, the groaning keel labors to bring forth a shipwreck.

Among all these, the fear of conscience is the worse, because the things we have mentioned, and others like them, pass away with their capacity to inflict suffering: but the fear of conscience is not blotted out. II. Now let us see how we are to understand what the Prophet says: Blessed are all who fear the Lord (Psalm 128:1). If all who fear the Lord are blessed, then no one is blessed: because there is no nation, there are no cattle, indeed no nature of living things, which does not fear God. When we are weighed down by bursting sounds, with hinges shaken on every side; when, against custom, the sky thunders, crashing with terrifying din;

when amid the blind darkness gathered by thick rain-laden clouds, the frequent flashing flames with their curving fires unhesitatingly mimic the intercepted light of day; when many things blaze with thunderbolts; when the earth either trembles or withdraws into itself by a gaping chasm; here there is no place for blessedness, where what is feared belongs not to devotion but to necessity. And so let us hear what Scripture says, whose admonitions are these: And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but that you fear the Lord your God, and walk in all His ways, and love Him, and keep His precepts with all your heart and with all your soul, that it may be well with you (Deuteronomy 10:12-13)? Do you not see that this fear is necessary for us?

This fear consists in the love of God; it begets itself by its own will; it builds up beauty by the knowledge of the divine law; it directs a man undaunted toward every kind of virtue; it faithfully obeys all the precepts; once begun, it lives innocently; it cultivates righteousness; without end it strives to fear, lest it fear anything besides God, whom it loves. III. In fine, by the support of this fear Daniel (Daniel 14), unarmed, slays the dragon terrible to the peoples; cast to the lions, he dines in peril, who is wont to fast out of peril. And Jonah, fearing the Lord, does not fear to go to a willing shipwreck (Jonah 1, 2):

with the deep gaping wide, he is buried more wretchedly than he is cast down, and yet he finds the shore to which he was bound before he sees it, happier in his tomb than in his ship. In prayer the mountain trembles: the trepidation belongs to the mountain, not to the apostles. Peter is borne over the sea-swell not as a shipwrecked man but as a traveler (Matthew 14:29-30): he fears the deep that does not fear to cut him off; nor yet does he wholly dissemble, lest it be disbelieved that he walked on his feet upon the sea. Against Thecla the most fierce accuser unsheathes the sword of his tongue: with his own ministers the public laws rage against her; the savagery is whetted by goads into ferocity, and yet she is found gentler than the men.

Lest anything seem lacking to a spectacle of such dire inhumanity, sea-monsters too are loosed against her: the girl is stripped of all her garments, she is clothed with fire. Amid so many instruments of death, while the spectator is afraid, she treads secure upon every kind of terror: unharmed, as though the world had been subdued, from that deadly cage she goes forth—no longer pitiable, yet pitiable—with a funereal circuit, bearing off the triumph of the world she has vanquished, she whom all had believed would perish by so many tortures. O necessary fear! which does nothing else but make men blessed: which fears by art, not by chance; by will, not by necessity; by religion, not by guilt: which fears God, not nature. Do you wish to know of what property it is?

all other fears, whatever they have invaded, they finish off by their growth: this one alone grows for this end, that it may make him whom it has possessed immortal. TRACTATE IX. On Avarice. I. It is no trifling crime, nor a frivolous one, brethren—least of all for a Christian—to be bound by the fetters of greed, and, blinded by the deadly darkness of profound night, to be wretchedly carried down to the depths. But because the whole world has caught fire from the conflagration of this inextinguishable plague, avarice, as is supposed, has ceased to be a crime, because it leaves behind no one who could convict it: for all alike are headlong hurled by insatiable frenzy into base gains: nor can anyone at all be found who would set upon it even for a single moment the bridle of justice.

Restless, it ever seethes, rages, fights, snatches, gathers, hoards, tenacious of its own, grasping for another's, content neither with its own, nor another's, nor with the whole world: it possesses all, and ever complains of want. In short, it never attains its desires. The more abundant it has become, the more wretched it grows: bereft of leisure, bereft of satiety. By right and wrong, armed with many arts, ways, and cunning devices, it riots, a despiser of its own safety and another's: fearing only this, that there fail anyone something to scrape away. Hence it is that whole nations fall by mutual wounds moment by moment: shaken cities groan: the lands stripped of their crops cannot breathe: the seas are more savage with pirates than by nature. The roads, barred with swords, grow fat with human blood:

Wills marvel that unknown heirs are recited out of themselves: the drunk-down storm of poison, a friendly hand under false pretense, securely dispatches harmless souls; with a new madness of hatred there is buried, before it is born, an unknown offspring—no longer in the mother's womb but in its tomb—which could feel neither lawful death nor life. Rightly therefore does the Apostle say: The root of all evils is avarice (1 Timothy 6:10): for from this mother and likewise mistress are born and celebrated all the things we have mentioned, and many others besides, indeed all evils everywhere without pause that gush forth, which human nature falsely longs to condemn:

for it swallows the camel and strains out the gnat, casts back drops of crimes, and drinks down the very fountain of avarice, whence the streams of crimes are poured out. II. Against this no rights, no laws, no honor stands in the way; because whatever is either bought or sold is not free: not nobility, because through this avarice gains credit, this it cultivates, through this it has found itself this very name: not holiness, not fortification, because nothing is so holy that it cannot be violated, nothing so fortified that it cannot be stormed by money: not the bond of blood, not friendship, because not by his own merit but by the bounty of gold, silver, and property is a man either loved or hated.

In short, this is the reason why we see the loving names of brothers for the most part friendlier to swords than to one another: why wealthy parents, the holiness of their own name destroyed, suffer their sons—not without disgrace to both—to wander, subjected to a beggar's coin at the crossroads: why children, judging their parents' life to be their own loss, laying violent hands upon nature itself, having seized their inheritances before the time, compel their parents to live in misery and to die amid their fortunes. O wickedness! Why do you take so much away from yourself, unhappy one? What would you do to a stranger, you who are avaricious toward yourself? O evil more detestable than the detestable!

while in turn they despoil, persecute, deceive one another, they approve enemies, praise robbers, excuse brigands, and it never comes into their mind that tomorrow's day is not within human power (Luke 11:20—rather Luke 12:20), nor even the very day on which the matter is transacted (James 4:14); because what is ever rolling on, it is doubtful what it may bring in a moment. But blind with eyes wide open (Luke 12:18), they enlarge their barns, narrow the lands, join woodland-pastures to woodland-pastures, and even if they should possess the whole world, they hate boundaries: they think it unlawful to have a neighbor. They build estates, dig down tombs, fear an omen who do not fear death. Thus, thus slain, they for the most part lie given over to dogs, birds, and beasts, scattered everywhere.

lost on both sides, with half-eaten bones, stripped bare even of their own flesh. Behold a fate worthy of the avaricious! That very man, that one, who had a vast estate, has a scanty mound; whom the excellent Prophet thus far rebukes, saying: What has pride profited us? or what has the boasting of riches conferred on us? all these things have passed away like a shadow (Wisdom 5:8-9). And the Lord Himself also says: What does it profit a man to gain the world and to suffer the loss of his own soul (Matthew 16:26)? III. Go now, insatiable man, and into the deadly gains of a detestable hoarding force even the very elements by new arts.

Though your inner chambers, crammed full, may glitter for you with the many-colored shapes of precious stones; though the earth groan beneath the weight of silver; though the whole house, blazing with gold, contend with the sun by its own flames; and though the degrees of honor, emptied out by you, may find us out—what does it profit you? Yet you ought to remember that death fears neither riches nor honors. O blind mind of men! how variously, yet to one and the same death does it strive—the poor man, when he unhappily seeks the wealth he does not happily possess; the rich man, when he supposes he does not possess the riches he does possess: in the one avarice exerts itself, in the other it riots, in both it grows, and in both it does not cease. Nevertheless a scanty piece of ground in one moment both levels and satisfies them—which gold, with all its ambition, cannot do.

IV. Hence one man sets out his money as a hook, that he may draw to himself another's resources, and he does not cease to feed it abroad with a deadly reckoning, that he may seek a sum—not what the loan gave, but what the days, the months, and the fingers have brought forth for him on the annual tally. But for the most part the moneylender himself too is stripped bare by his own industry, when by some chance fraud, want, flight, or death has wrenched the debtor from him: for it is natural to avarice that it makes one greedier; for the most part it takes away more from the avaricious man than it bestows; and thus it often happens that he who craves another's deservedly loses even his own. There another man closes the roads to travelers; he bars them from the meadows, bars them from the woods, bars them from the waters.