the same, as steward and provider of His own house, through you tore down what was ill-built, through us built up what was to be built; the same, as the diligent husbandman of His possession, through you rooted up the barren and harmful things, through us planted the useful and fruitful. Therefore let us give the glory not to ourselves but to His mercy, in whose hand are both we and our words. And as in our above-mentioned son our lowliness has praised your ministry, so also let your Holiness rejoice over our ministry. With a fatherly and brotherly heart, then, receive from us one corrected by merciful gentleness, even as we received from you one rebuked by merciful severity.
For though one thing was done through you and another through us, yet one charity made both necessary to a brother's salvation. Therefore one God did it, since God is charity. Accordingly, as he was received by us through his presence, so let him be received by you through his letter — to which letter we have thought fit to subscribe even with our own hand, testifying that it is his. For, being admonished, he readily saw that God was made man, because the Word was made flesh and the Word was God; and the Apostle taught him that this was done not by losing what He was, but by taking on what He was not; for He emptied Himself, not losing the form of God, but taking the form of a servant.
For this indeed was what this man feared, when he was unwilling to confess that God was born of a woman, that God was crucified and suffered other human things — lest the divinity should be believed to have been changed in the man or corrupted by admixture with the man: a pious fear, but an incautious error. Piously he saw that the divinity cannot be changed, but incautiously he presumed that the Son of Man could be separated from the Son of God, so that this one and that one should be another and another, and so that one of them should not be Christ, or there should be two Christs.
But after he came to know that the Word of God, that is the only-begotten Son of God, was so made the Son of Man that neither was turned into the other, but each remaining in its own substance, God so suffered human things in the man as to keep the divine whole in Himself, he confessed Christ to be God-man without any fear, and feared more the addition of a fourth person in the Trinity than that loss of substance in the divinity. This his correction we by no means doubt that your Love both gladly receives and makes known to those to whom his error had been a scandal, because those also who came with him to us
were together with him corrected and healed, as is expressly held in their subscriptions, which were made in our presence. It remains that, being glad concerning our brother's salvation, you may deign in turn to gladden us by the rescripts of your Blessedness. We wish you, most beloved and honourable brothers, to be well in the Lord and mindful of us. LETTER 220. To the lord son Boniface, to be protected and governed by the mercy of God unto present and eternal salvation, Augustine.
A more faithful man, and one who would have easier access to your ears to carry my letter, I could never have found than the Lord has now provided in the servant and minister of Christ, the deacon Paul, most dear to us both — that I might speak something to you, not concerning your power and the honour you bear in this malignant world, nor concerning the safety of your corruptible and mortal flesh, since it too is transitory and, however long it may last, is always uncertain, but concerning that salvation which Christ has promised us, who for this cause was here dishonoured and crucified, that He might teach us to despise rather than to love the goods of this world, and to love and to hope for from Him that which He showed in His resurrection;
for He rose from the dead and dies no more, and death shall no longer have dominion over Him. I know there is no lack of men who love you according to the life of this world, and according to it give you counsels sometimes useful, sometimes useless, because they are men and, as they are able, are wise for the present, not knowing what may befall the next day. But according to God, lest your soul perish, no one readily counsels you — not because there are none who would do this, but because it is hard to find when they might be able to speak these things with you. For I too have always desired and never found a place or time to deal with you as it behoved me to deal with a man whom I greatly love in Christ.
But you know what manner of man you saw me at Hippo, when you deigned to come to me, since I could scarcely speak, worn out by the weakness of my body. Now therefore, my son, hear me at least as I converse with you through a letter, which in your perils I could never send you, thinking of the danger to the bearer and taking care lest my letter should come to those to whom I would not wish it. Wherefore I beg you to pardon me, if you think I have feared more than I ought; yet I have spoken what I feared. Hear me then, or rather the Lord our God through the ministry of my infirmity; recall what manner of man you still were, while established in the body of religious memory of your former wife, and how at her recent death the vanity of this world made you shudder, and how you longed for the servitude of God.
We know, we are witnesses, what you discussed with us at Tubunae concerning your mind and your will. Alypius the brother and I alone were with you. For I do not think that the earthly cares with which you have been filled had power enough to be able to delete this utterly from your memory. Surely you desired to relinquish all the public affairs with which you were occupied and to betake yourself to a holy leisure, and to live in that life in which the servants of God, the monks, live. But what called you back from doing so, except that you considered — as we pointed out to you — how much profit it would bring to the churches of Christ,
if you did what you were doing with this sole intention: that those defended from the assaults of the barbarians might lead a quiet and tranquil life, as the Apostle says, in all piety and chastity, while you yourself sought nothing from this world save what was necessary to sustain this life of yours and your family, girded with the belt of most chaste continence, and among bodily arms more safely and strongly fortified with spiritual arms? Since therefore we rejoiced that you were of this purpose, you set sail and took a wife. But to have sailed was of obedience, which according to the Apostle you owed to the higher powers; yet you would not have taken a wife, had you not, forsaking the continence you had undertaken, been overcome by concupiscence. When I had learned this, I confess
I was struck dumb with amazement; yet my grief was in part consoled by hearing that you were unwilling to marry her unless she were first made a catholic. And nevertheless the heresy of those who deny the true Son of God so far prevailed in your house that by them your daughter was baptized. And now, if things have not been falsely reported to us — would that they were false! — that by those same heretics even handmaids consecrated to God were re-baptized, with how great fountains of tears is so great an evil to be bewailed! Men also say — and perhaps they lie — that your wife herself did not suffice you, but that you were polluted by consorting with I know not what concubines.
These things, which lie open to all, so many and so great evils which have followed from you after you were married, what shall I say of them? You are a Christian, you have a heart, you fear God. Consider yourself what I am unwilling to say, and you will find of how great evils you ought to do penance, on account of which I believe the Lord spares you and frees you from all perils, that you may do that penance as it ought to be done — but only if you hear what is written: 'Delay not to be converted to the Lord, nor defer it from day to day.' You say indeed that you have a just cause, of which I am not the judge, since I cannot hear both sides;
but whatever your cause may be, about which there is now no need to inquire or dispute, can you deny before God that you would not have come into this necessity, had you not loved the goods of this world? — goods which, as the servant of God whom we knew you to be before, you ought altogether to have despised and held for nothing; and indeed to have taken things offered, that you might use them for piety, but not to have sought things denied or delegated in such a way that on their account you were brought into this necessity, where, when vain things are loved, evils are perpetrated — few indeed by you, but many on account of you — and where, when things that harm for a brief time are feared (if indeed they harm at all), those things are committed which truly harm for eternity.
That I may say something of these matters: who does not see that many men cleave to you to protect your power or safety, who, even if they were all faithful to you and no snares were to be feared from any of them, yet through you desire to attain those goods which they too love not according to God but according to the world; and thereby you, who ought to have restrained and checked your own desires, are forced to fulfil those of others? And that this may be done, it is necessary that many things which displease God be done. Nor even so are such desires satisfied; for they are more easily cut off in those who love God than they are ever sated in those who love the world. On which account the divine Scripture says:
'Do not love the world, nor the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him; for all that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the age, which is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world passes away, and the lust thereof; but he who does the will of God abides for ever, even as God abides for ever.' When therefore shall you be able — of so many armed men, whose greed must be nourished and whose ferocity is feared — when, I say, shall you be able, not to satiate (for that can in no way be done) the concupiscence of those who love the world, but even in some part to feed it, lest all things perish the more, unless you do the things which God forbids and threatens against those who do them?
On account of which you see so many things laid waste, that now scarcely anything cheap enough to be plundered can be found. But what shall I say of the devastation of Africa, which the African barbarians are working with none resisting, while you, such a man as you are, are occupied with your own necessities and order nothing whereby this calamity may be averted? Who would have believed, who would have feared, that with Boniface as Count of the Household and of Africa established in Africa with so great an army and power — who as tribune with a few confederate troops had subdued all those very nations by conquest and terror — now the barbarians would dare so much, advance so far, lay waste so much, plunder so much, and make deserts of so many places which had been full of peoples?
Who did not say that, whenever you assumed the comital power, the African barbarians would be not only subdued but even made tributaries to the Roman commonwealth? And now you see how contrary to this the hope of men has turned out. Nor need I speak longer with you on this, since you can think of these things more than we can say. But perhaps you answer to this that it should rather be imputed to those who wronged you, who returned to your dutiful services not equal but contrary things. Those causes I can neither hear nor examine; rather look at and examine your own cause, which you know you have not with any men whatsoever, but with God; for since you live faithfully in Christ, you ought to fear to offend Him.
For I rather attend to higher causes, because, that Africa should suffer such great evils, men ought to impute to their own sins. Nevertheless I would not have you belong to the number of those wicked and unjust men through whom God scourges with temporal punishments whom He wills. For to those very wicked, if they be not corrected, He reserves eternal torments, while He justly uses their malice to bring temporal evils upon others. Do you attend to God, do you consider Christ, who bestowed such great good things and endured such great evils.
Whoever desire to belong to His kingdom and to live blessedly always with Him and under Him, love even their enemies, do good to those who hate them, and pray for those from whom they suffer persecution; and if at any time they apply a troublesome severity for the sake of discipline, they yet do not lose the most sincere charity. If therefore good things have been bestowed on you — although earthly and transitory ones — by the Roman empire, since it too is earthly and not heavenly, and cannot bestow save what it has in its power: if therefore good things have been conferred on you, do not render evil for good; but if evils have been inflicted on you, do not render evil for evil. Which of these two it may be I neither wish to discuss nor am able to judge; I speak to a Christian:
do not render either evil for good or evil for evil. You say to me perhaps: 'In such great necessity, what do you wish me to do?' If you seek counsel from me according to this world — how this transitory safety of yours may be secure, and how your power and wealth may either be preserved as you now have them, or even be increased — what I should answer you, I do not know: for these uncertain things can have no certain counsel. But if you consult me according to God, lest your soul perish, and you fear the words of Truth saying, 'What does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, but suffer the loss of his own soul?' — then I plainly have what to say; I have counsel by me which you may hear from me. But what need is there to say anything other than that which I said above:
'Do not love the world, nor the things that are in the world. For if anyone loves the world, the charity of the Father is not in him. For all things that are in the world are the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the age, which is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world passes away, and the lust thereof; but he who does the will of God abides for ever, even as God abides for ever': behold the counsel; seize it and act. Here let it appear whether you are a brave man; conquer the desires by which this world is loved, do penance for past evils, when, overcome by those desires, you were dragged through vain longings.
If you accept this counsel, if you hold and keep it, you will both attain to those sure goods and, with the salvation of your soul, live amid these uncertain things. But perhaps you again ask me how you may do these things, entangled as you are in such great necessities of this world. Pray strongly and say to God what you have in the psalm: 'Deliver me from my necessities.' For then those necessities are ended, when those desires are conquered.
He who heard you, and us for you, that you might be freed from so many and so great perils of visible and bodily wars, where only this life, one day to be ended, is imperilled — while the soul does not perish unless it be held captive by malignant desires — He Himself will hear you, that you may invisibly and spiritually conquer the interior and invisible enemies, that is, those very desires, and so use this world as not using it, that from its goods you may do good and not become evil; because these goods too are good, and are not given to men save by Him who has power over all things heavenly and earthly. But lest they should be thought evils, they are given also to the good;
and lest they should be thought great or supreme goods, they are given also to the wicked; and likewise these things are taken away both from the good, that they may be tested, and from the wicked, that they may be tormented. For who does not know, who is so foolish as not to see, that the safety of this mortal body and of its corruptible members, and strength, and victory over hostile men, and temporal honour and power, and the other earthly goods, are given both to the good and to the wicked, and taken away both from the good and from the wicked? But the salvation of the soul together with the immortality of the body, and the strength of righteousness, and victory over hostile desires, and glory and honour and peace for ever, are not given save to the good. These things therefore love, these things desire, these things by all means seek.
For the acquiring and obtaining of these, give alms, pour out prayers, practise fasting, as much as you can without injury to your body. But those earthly goods do not love, however abundantly they may flow to you. So use them that from them you may do many good things, but no evil thing on their account. For all such things will perish, but good works do not perish, even those which are done from perishing goods. For if you had no wife, I would say to you what we also said to the tribune, that you should live in the chastity of continence; I would add,
what we then forbade to be done: that you should now, as far as you could without breach of the peace of human affairs, withdraw yourself from these warlike matters and give yourself leisure for that life in fellowship with the saints, for which you then desired leisure — where in silence the soldiers of Christ fight, not that they may kill men, but that they may overthrow principalities and powers and the spiritual forces of wickedness, that is, the devil and his angels. For these are the enemies whom the saints conquer, whom they cannot see; and yet those whom they do not see they conquer by conquering these things which they do feel. But that I should not exhort you to that life, your wife is a hindrance, without whose consent it is not lawful for you to live in continence.
For although you ought not to have married her after those words of yours at Tubunae, she nevertheless, knowing nothing of these things, innocently and simply married you. And would that you could persuade her to continence, so that without hindrance you might render to God what you know you owe Him! But if you cannot deal thus with her, at least keep conjugal chastity, and pray God, who may free you from your necessities, that what you cannot do now, you may sometime be able to do. Yet, that you may love God and not love the world; that in these very wars, if it is still necessary for you to be engaged in them, you may keep faith and seek peace; that from the goods of the world you may do good works and not do evil works on account of the world's goods — in this either your wife is no hindrance, or she ought to be no hindrance.
That I should write these things to you, my most beloved son, charity has commanded — that charity by which I love you according to God, not according to this world; for, considering also what is written, 'Rebuke a wise man and he will love you; rebuke a fool and he will add to hating you,' I ought to have thought you not a fool but a wise man. LETTER 221. To the lord, deservedly venerable and truly most blessed father, bishop Augustine, from Quodvultdeus the deacon. Long was I anxious and fearful, and several times I put off this my request. But what chiefly emboldened me, as is wont to be said, was the benevolence of your Blessedness, approved by all; which while I consider, I feared the more, lest by not asking I should be judged by the Lord as proud, by not seeking as slothful, by not knocking as lazy.
And I should have believed that a will of this kind alone would suffice for me, if I could not obtain the fruit; but since I know for certain that the door of the divine word, which the heavenly grace has opened to your Reverence, and that your holy mind, which Christ possesses, is ready not only to lay open to all who are willing, but even to persuade the unwilling not to be reluctant to enter, I will not, by superfluous verbosity, delay the business of your Reverence, but will briefly indicate the desire of my entreaty. From my own case I conjecture that there are some in the clergy even of this most ample city who are unskilled; and how much it would profit that whole order, this which I seek, I offer to the consideration of your Holiness to be examined.
For I presume that even I, unworthy though I am, shall obtain the privilege of all who merit this from your spiritual labours, O deservedly venerable and truly most blessed father. I therefore pray your Piety, that you would deign to expound: from that time when the Christian religion received the name of the promised inheritance, what heresies there have been and are, what errors they have brought in and bring in, what they have held and hold against the catholic church concerning the faith, the Trinity, baptism, penance, the man Christ, the God Christ, the resurrection, the New and Old Testaments, and absolutely all things in which they dissent from the truth; which of them have baptism and which do not, and after whom the church baptizes yet does not re-baptize;
in what manner it receives those who come, and what it may answer to each by law, authority, and reason — these things may you deign to set forth. Let not your Blessedness credit me with such great folly as not to perceive with how many and how vast volumes there is need, that these things may be resolved. But this I do not ask to be done; for I do not doubt that it has been done in manifold ways.
but I ask that briefly, concisely, and summarily both the opinions of any given heresy be set down, and what the catholic church holds against it be subjoined, as much as is sufficient for instruction; so that, as it were from a kind of memorandum compiled out of all, if anyone should wish to know some objection or refutation more fully, more completely, and more plainly, he might be referred to the rich and magnificent volumes on which it is established that labour has been bestowed by various authors, and chiefly by your Reverence in this very matter.
Such an admonition, as I think, will suffice for the learned and the unskilled, the leisured and the busy, and for those promoted from any quarter to the ministry of any grade of the church, since both he who has read much briefly recalls the same, and the ignorant is instructed by an epitome, that he may know what to hold, what to avoid, what to shun so as not to do it, what to pursue so as to do it. But perhaps — if indeed, as I judge, it is true —
even against the malignant minds and deceitful lips of slanderers, this small work, among your other magnificent testimonies, will not be lacking to the crown of your labours: so that those to whom a more ample field for slandering lies open, being hemmed in by the strong and on every side closed-off boundaries of the faith, and being beset by every kind of the weapons of truth, laid low suddenly even by a single manifold dart, may not dare, being carcasses, to breathe out their spirits. I see how burdensome I am to one who thinks and disposes better things, how great to a holy old man who is also bearing the complaints of his body.
But through Christ the Lord I beg you — He who granted that you should be a partaker of His wisdom without envy — that you bestow this grace upon the unlearned of the Church, you who acknowledge yourself to be a debtor both to the wise and to the unwise, and who may rightly and justly say: 'See that I have not laboured for myself alone, but for all who seek after truth.' I could have offered still further suppliant and manifold prayers, and enlisted along with me whole bands of the untrained; but I have preferred now to rejoice at your dictating rather than still to detain you at reading. Letter 222. To his most beloved son and fellow-deacon Quodvultdeus, Augustine.
Having received the letter of your charity, in which with most ardent zeal you asked me to write something briefly concerning all the heresies that have sprouted up against His doctrine since the coming of the Lord and Saviour, I at once, when an occasion was found, wrote back how difficult this is, by the hand of my son Philocalus, a leading citizen of Hippo. But soon this other occasion was also offered, by which I now write back and briefly show the difficulty of that work. A certain Philastrius, bishop of Brescia, whom I myself also saw at Milan together with holy Ambrose, wrote a book on this subject, not passing over even those heresies that existed among the Jewish people before the Lord's coming; these he recorded as twenty-eight, and after the Lord's coming one hundred and twenty-eight.
On this subject Epiphanius also, the Cyprian bishop, wrote in Greek, being praiseworthily renowned in the teaching of the Catholic faith. But he too, gathering the heresies of both periods, comprised eighty of them. Since therefore both wished to do what you ask of me, you see nevertheless from the number of sects how greatly they differ among themselves. This certainly would not have happened unless one thing seemed to be a heresy to the one of them and another thing to the other. For it is not to be supposed that Epiphanius was ignorant of any that Philastrius knew, since Epiphanius stood out as far more learned than Philastrius. So that we ought rather to say that very many escaped Philastrius, if the former comprised so many more and the latter fewer.
But without doubt, in that question where it is disputed what a heresy is, the same thing did not appear to both. And in truth this is altogether difficult to define, and therefore to be guarded against, when we attempt to reduce them all to a number, lest we pass over some, although they be heresies, or number some, when they are not heresies. See therefore whether perhaps I ought to send you the book of holy Epiphanius; for I judge that he spoke more learnedly on this than Philastrius. It could be translated at Carthage into the Latin tongue more easily and conveniently, so that you might rather furnish us with what you ask of us. I strongly commend the bearer. He is a subdeacon of our diocese, and from the estate of the honourable Orontius, a man most dear to us.
On his behalf, moreover, and on behalf of his father, by whom he was adopted, I have also written to that very man. When your Christian kindness has read that letter, I ask that you deign to assist it before the aforementioned man by your intercession. I have also sent with him a man of the Church, lest access to your holiness should be difficult for him; for I am not a little anxious about him, from which anxiety the Lord, as I hope, will free me through the earnest effort of your charity. I ask also that you not be unwilling to write back to me how that Theodosius stands in the Catholic faith, through whom certain Manichaeans were betrayed, and those very ones whom we suppose to have been corrected after being betrayed by him. If perchance you have heard anything also about the departure of the holy bishops, let me know it.
May you live to God. Letter 223. To the lord deservedly venerable and truly most blessed holy father Augustine, Quodvultdeus the deacon. One memorandum indeed of your reverence, which you deigned to send through a churchman, I have received; for the one which your blessedness signified had been sent earlier through the honourable man Philocalus has not yet reached me. But although I have always been conscious of my own sins, now nevertheless I have plainly recognized, upon obtaining that which I entreated, that my person is a hindrance to the whole Church in its service.