For it is not fitting that I, who from youth to this age have sweated with toil in a little monastery among holy brethren, should dare to write anything against a bishop of my own communion—and that bishop whom I began to love before I knew him, who first challenged me to friendship, whom I rejoiced to see rising after me in the erudition of the Scriptures. Therefore either deny your book, if perchance it is not yours, and cease to demand a reply to things you have not written; or, if it is yours, ingenuously confess it, so that, if I write anything in my own defense, the fault may be in you who provoked, not in me who was compelled to answer.
You add, moreover, that you are prepared, if anything in your writings has moved me, or I should wish to correct it, to receive it in a brotherly manner, and that you will not only rejoice in my goodwill toward you, but even beg that I do this very thing. Again I say what I feel: you provoke an old man, you goad one who is silent, you seem to boast your learning. But it is not for my age to be thought ill-disposed toward one whom I ought rather to favor. And if in the Gospels and the prophets perverse men find something they may strive to censure, do you wonder if in your books, and especially in the exposition of the Scriptures—which are exceedingly obscure—certain things should seem to differ from the straight line? And I say this, not that I already judge certain things in your works to be censurable.
For I have never given attention to the reading of them, nor is there an abundance of these copies among us, except the books of your Soliloquies and certain little commentaries on the Psalms; which, if I wished to examine, I would show to differ—I will not say from me, who am nothing, but from the interpretations of the ancient Greeks. Farewell, my dearest friend, in age a son, in dignity a father; and observe this, as requested by me, that whatever you write to me, you cause to reach me first. LXXIII. TO THE LORD, TO BE VENERATED AND MOST LONGED-FOR BROTHER AND FELLOW-PRESBYTER JEROME, AUGUSTINE SENDS GREETING IN THE LORD.
Although I suppose that, before you received these, my letter came into your hands, which I sent through the servant of God, our son the deacon Cyprian, by which you would most certainly recognize that the letter is mine—copies of which you have mentioned reached you there—whence I now think that I have begun to be buffeted and tossed by your replies, as though by the great and sharp gauntlets of Entellus, like the bold Dares: nevertheless I now answer those very letters of yours which you have deigned to send me through our holy son Asterius, in which I have found many marks of your most benevolent charity toward me, and again certain indications of some offense taken by you at me. And so, where I was soothed in reading, there I was immediately struck—admiring this indeed above all.
For, whereas you say that you therefore judged that credit ought not rashly to be given to the copies of my letters, lest perhaps, when you replied, being aggrieved, I should justly complain that you ought first to have proved the discourse to be mine and so to reply, you afterward bid me, if the letter is mine, to write openly, or to send more genuine copies, that without any rancor of spleen we may engage in the disputation of the Scriptures. For in what way can we engage in this disputation without rancor, if you are preparing to injure me? Or if you are not preparing to, how could I, when you were not injuring me, justly complain of having been injured by you—that you ought first to have proved the discourse to be mine and so to reply? Is this too 'to injure' in this way? For unless you had injured me by replying, I could not justly complain.
Accordingly, since you reply in such a way as to injure, what place is left to us for engaging in the disputation of the Scriptures without any rancor? For my part, far be it that I should be injured, if by sure reasoning you should wish and be able to demonstrate to me that you have understood that passage from the Apostle's letter, or anything else of the holy Scriptures, more truly than I. Nay rather, far be it that I should not, with the giving of thanks, count it among my gains, if I should be instructed by your teaching or corrected by your emending. Yet nevertheless you, my dearest brother, unless you thought yourself injured by my writings, would not think that I could be injured by your replies. For in no way would I have supposed that of you—that, not thinking yourself injured, you would nonetheless reply in such a way as to injure.
Or if, when you did not write back in that manner, I was still supposed—on account of my excessive foolishness—to be capable of being wounded, then by this very thing you have plainly wounded me: that you thought such a thing of me. But in no way would you rashly believe me to be such a man—me whom you have never found to be so—you who, even when you knew my style, refused to believe rashly in copies of my letters. For if you saw, not without reason, that I would justly have complained had you rashly believed those to be my letters which were not mine, how much more justly would I complain that I myself was rashly thought to be such a man as I was not by one who so thought me? By no means, then, should you have slipped so far as to suppose that, even when you did not write back anything by which I might be wounded, I could nonetheless be judged so foolish as to be wounded even by such a reply of yours.
It remains, therefore, that you would have set about to wound me by writing back only if you had known by certain proof that those letters were mine. And since I do not believe that you would think I ought to be wounded unjustly, it follows that I must acknowledge my own sin—namely, that I first wounded you by that letter which I cannot deny to be mine. Why then do I strive against the current of the river, rather than instead beg pardon? I therefore entreat you, by the meekness of Christ, that if I have wounded you, you would forgive me, and not in turn wound me by rendering evil for evil. But you would wound me if you were to keep silent about my error, which you may perhaps have found in my deeds or words.
For if you reprehend in me things that ought not to be reprehended, you wound yourself more than me; and far be it from your character and holy purpose that you should do this out of a will to wound, censuring in me with a slanderous tooth something which with a truthful mind you know ought not to be censured. And so either with a benevolent heart you would rebuke me, even if the thing you think deserves rebuke is free of fault, or with a fatherly affection you would soothe me for that which you cannot add to. For it may happen that something appears to you otherwise than the truth holds—provided only that nothing is done by you otherwise than love holds.
And I, for my part, will most gladly receive a most friendly rebuke, even if what cannot rightly be defended did not deserve to be rebuked; or I shall at once acknowledge both your benevolence and my own fault, and—as far as the Lord grants—be found grateful in the one and amended in the other. Why then should I perhaps dread your hard but surely wholesome words, as though they were the boxing-gloves of Entellus? That man was being beaten, not cured, and therefore was being vanquished, not healed. But I, if I receive your medicinal correction calmly, shall not grieve; yet if human weakness—or my own—cannot but be a little saddened even when I am truly reproved, then it is better that a swelling of the head should ache while it is being cured than that, while it is spared, it should not be healed.
For this is what he saw keenly who said that quarrelling enemies are for the most part more useful than friends who are afraid to rebuke; for the former, while they wrangle, sometimes say true things which we may correct, whereas the latter show less liberty of justice than they ought, while they fear to embitter the sweetness of friendship. Wherefore, even if you are an ox—as you seem to yourself—wearied perhaps by the old age of the body, yet not lacking in vigour of mind as you sweat in fruitful labour upon the Lord's threshing-floor: behold, here I am; if I have said anything amiss, plant your foot more firmly. The weight of your years need not be burdensome to me, so long as the chaff of my fault is threshed out. And so that which you set at the end of your letter, I read or recall with a sigh of great longing.
«Would that,» you say, «we might merit your embraces, and by mutual conference either teach or learn something!» But I say: Would that at least we dwelt in neighbouring regions of the earth, so that, if our conversations cannot be mingled, our letters at least might be more frequent! As it is, however, we are so far apart by such an interval of places from each other's presence, that I remember I wrote to your holiness about those words of the Apostle to the Galatians while I was a young man, and behold, already an old man I have not yet merited a reply; and copies of my letter reached you more easily—by some occasion or other going before—than the letter itself which I took charge of; for the man who had then received it neither delivered it to you nor brought word back to me.
But so great a mastery of letters appears in your writings—those that have been able to come into our hands—that I would prefer nothing among my studies, if I could, than to cleave to your side. And since I cannot do this, I am thinking of sending to you some one of our sons in the Lord to be instructed, if indeed I merit your written reply on this matter too. For neither is there in me, nor can there henceforth be, so great a knowledge of the divine Scriptures as I see to be in you; and whatever ability I have in this matter, I expend as best I can upon the people of God. But because of my ecclesiastical occupations I am altogether unable to have leisure for instructing the studious more diligently than the people hear. We do not know what slanderous writings against your name are said to have reached Africa;
we have received, however, that which you deigned to send in reply to those slanders. Having read it through, I confess I grieved much that so great an evil of discord should have arisen between persons so dear and intimate, joined by a bond of friendship most well known to almost all the churches. And indeed how much you restrain yourself, and how you hold in check the stings of your indignation, so as not to render slander for slander, is sufficiently apparent in your letter. Yet nonetheless, when I had read those very things, I pined with grief and stiffened with fear at what those things she wrote against you would do to me, had they perhaps come into my hands. Woe to the world because of scandals! Behold it comes to pass, behold it is utterly fulfilled, what Truth says: Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall grow cold.
For what faithful hearts may now safely be poured out to one another? Into whose feelings may love securely cast its whole self? Who, in short, would not be feared as a friend that will become an enemy, if between Jerome and Rufinus this could arise which we lament? O wretched and pitiable condition! O untrustworthy knowledge of the present wills of friends, where there is no foreknowledge of things to come! But why should I think this to be lamented by one concerning another, when a man is not even known to himself as regards the future? For he knows, at best and scarcely, only what sort he now is; but what sort he will afterwards be, he is ignorant.
Furthermore, this—not only the knowledge of what sort each one is, but also the foreknowledge of what sort he will be—if it exists in the holy and blessed angels, then how the devil could ever have been blessed while he was still a good angel, knowing his own future iniquity and everlasting punishment, I do not at all see. On this matter, if indeed it is needful to know it, I should like to hear what you think. See what the lands and seas do, which physically separate us. If this my letter which you are reading were myself, you would already be telling me what I have asked; but as it is, when will you write back? when will you send? when will it arrive? when shall I receive it? And yet would that some day it might come to pass, which cannot come to pass as quickly as we wish—which we endure with all the patience we can!
Whence I return to those most sweet words of your letter, most full of holy longing, and I make them in turn my own: «Would that we might merit your embraces, and by mutual conference either teach or learn something»—if indeed there could be in any way something that I might teach you.
But in these words—now not yours only but also mine—where I delight and am refreshed, and am consoled in no small part even by the very longing of us both, though it hangs suspended and unattained, there again I am pierced by the sharpest goads of grief, while I ponder that between you two—to whom God had granted this very thing which each of us has wished, richly and abundantly, that being most closely joined and most intimate you might together lick the honey of the holy Scriptures—the ruin of so great bitterness has crept in; a ruin to be dreaded when, where, and by whom is it not?—since at that very time, when, the burdens of the world now cast off, you followed the Lord unencumbered and lived together in that land in which the Lord, walking with human feet, said:
I give you my peace, He says; my peace I leave with you—to you, men mature in age and dwelling in the eloquence of the Lord, this could happen. Truly the life of man upon the earth is a temptation. Woe is me, who cannot find you both together anywhere! Perhaps—so am I moved, so do I grieve, so do I fear—I would fall down at your feet, I would weep.
As much as I could prevail, I would beseech; as much as I love, now each of you for his own sake, now both for one another's sake, and for the sake of others, and especially of the weak for whom Christ died—who watch you as though in the theatre of this life, with great peril to themselves—that you not scatter abroad about yourselves, by writing such things, that which, since being at concord you will not be able to delete, you would refuse to be at concord; or which, being at concord, you would fear to read, lest you quarrel again. Truly I say to your charity that nothing has made me tremble more than this example, when I read in your letter certain indications of your indignation—not so much those about Entellus and the wearied ox, where you seemed to me to be jesting cheerfully rather than threatening angrily,
as that which it appears plainly enough you wrote in earnest—about which I have spoken above perhaps more than I ought, but not more than I feared—where you said: «Lest perhaps, being wounded, you should justly complain.» I ask you, if it can be done, that between us we may seek and discuss something whereby our hearts may be fed without the bitterness of discord. But if I cannot say what seems to me needing amendment in your writings, nor you in mine, except with the suspicion of envy or the wounding of friendship, then let us rest from these things and spare our life and salvation. Let that which puffs up assuredly attain less, provided that which builds up be not offended. I feel myself to be far from that perfection of which it is written:
If any man offend not in word, he is a perfect man. But plainly, in the mercy of God, I think I can easily beg pardon of you if I have offended in anything; which you ought to disclose to me, so that, when I have heard you, you may gain your brother. For it is not the case that, because on account of the remoteness of the lands you cannot do this between me and you, therefore you ought to let me remain in error. As for the very matters which we wish to know: if I know or believe or think that I hold anything true, in which you feel otherwise, then—as far as the Lord grants—I will try, without injury to you, to assert it. But as regards your taking offence: when I have perceived that you are indignant, I will beg nothing other than pardon.
Nor do I at all think that you could have been provoked to anger, unless either I said what I ought not, or did not say it as I ought; for I do not wonder that we know each other less than we are known by those most closely joined and most intimate to us. Into whose charity I confess I easily cast my whole self, especially wearied by the scandals of the age, and I rest therein without any anxiety. For I perceive God to be there, into whom I securely cast myself and in whom I securely rest. Nor in this my security do I at all dread that tomorrow's uncertainty of human frailty over which I groaned above.
For when I perceive that a man burning with Christian charity has by it become a faithful friend to me, whatever of my counsels and thoughts I commit to him, I commit not to a man but to Him in whom he abides, that he may be such; for God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God. And should he forsake Him, he must needs cause as much grief as, while abiding, he had caused joy. Yet nonetheless, one who from an intimate friend has become an enemy may rather seek something to fabricate cunningly, than find something to betray in anger. And this everyone easily attains—not by hiding what he has done, but by not doing what he would wish to be hidden.
This the mercy of God grants to the good and pious: that among whatever future enemies they may live free and secure, they do not betray the sins of others committed to them which they would fear to have betrayed, while they themselves commit none. For when something false is fabricated by a slanderer, either it is not believed at all, or at least, with one's soundness untouched, only one's reputation is troubled. But that evil which is perpetrated—there the intimate enemy is present, even if it be published abroad by no intimate's loquacity or quarrel.
Wherefore, who among the prudent would not see how tolerably even you bear the now unbelievable enmities of one once most friendly and most intimate, consoled by a good conscience; and how—whether by what he boasts, or by what is perhaps believed by certain people—you would reckon it among the weapons on the left hand, with which no less than with those on the right the battle against the devil is fought? Yet nonetheless I would prefer him in some way milder than you thus more armed. This is a great and sad marvel, that from such friendships things have come to these enmities. It will be a joyful and far greater thing to have returned from such enmities to the former concord. LXXIV. TO THE MOST BLESSED LORD AND DESERVEDLY VENERABLE BROTHER AND FELLOW-PRIEST PRAESIDIUS, AUGUSTINE SENDS GREETING IN THE LORD.
As I asked your sincerity in person, so now also I admonish you, that you not find it burdensome to send my letters to our holy brother and fellow-presbyter Jerome. And that your charity may know in what manner you too ought to write to him on my behalf, I have sent copies of the letters both of mine to him and of his to me; and when you have read them, in your holy prudence you may easily see both my own measure, which I thought must be kept, and his emotion, which I not without cause feared. Or if I have written anything which I ought not, or in a manner in which I ought not, send word not to him about me but rather to me myself with brotherly love, whereby, being corrected, I may ask him to forgive, if I myself shall have recognized my own fault. LXXV.
TO THE TRULY HOLY AND MOST BLESSED LORD, POPE AUGUSTINE, JEROME SENDS GREETING IN CHRIST. Three letters at once—or rather short little books—I received through the deacon Cyprian, from your dignity, containing various things which you call «questions» but which I regard as «reprehensions» of my little works. If I should wish to reply to these, there would be need of a book's magnitude; nevertheless I will try, as far as I am able to do.
—not to exceed the measure of a somewhat longer letter, and not to cause delay to a brother in haste, who three days before he was to set out demanded letters from me, so that I am almost compelled, as though girded for battle, to blurt out these things, such as they are, and to reply in hasty speech, not with the maturity of a writer but with the rashness of one dictating, which for the most part turns not to instruction but to mischance—just as sudden wars throw even the bravest soldiers into confusion, and they are forced to flee before they can snatch up their arms. But our armour is Christ and the teaching of the apostle, who writes to the Ephesians: Take up the arms of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day; and again:
Stand, having your loins girt about with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
Armed once with these weapons, David, the accused, went forth to battle, and taking five smooth stones from the torrent, he showed that there was nothing of harshness or filth in his senses amid the whirlwinds of this world, drinking of the torrent in the way; and therefore, being exalted, he cut off the most proud head of Goliath with that man's own very sword, striking the blasphemer on the forehead and wounding him in that part of the body in which also Uzziah, the presumer upon the priesthood, is smitten with leprosy. And the saint glories in the Lord, saying: The light of Thy countenance is signed upon us, O Lord. Let us therefore say, we too: My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready; I will sing and give praise in my glory; arise, psaltery and harp, I will arise at daybreak—that in us may be fulfilled:
Open thy mouth, and I will fill it; and: The Lord will give the word to those that preach good tidings with great power. I do not doubt that you too pray this very thing, that among us contending the truth may prevail. For you do not seek your own glory but Christ's; and when you have conquered, I too shall conquer, if I understand my own error; and on the contrary, when I conquer, you prevail, because not the children lay up treasure for the parents, but the parents for the children. And in the book of Paralipomenon we read that the children of Israel went forth to fight with a peaceful mind, even amid the very swords and effusions of blood and the corpses of the slain, thinking not of their own victory but of that of peace.
Let us therefore reply to all things, and unravel your manifold questions in brief speech, if Christ command it. I pass over the salutations and courtesies with which you caress my head; I keep silent about the flatteries with which you strive to soften your reprehension of me; I will come to the matters themselves. You say that you received a book of mine from a certain brother, one that had no title, in which I had enumerated the ecclesiastical writers, both Greek and Latin; and that when you asked of him—to use your words—why the frontispiece page was not inscribed, or by what name it was designated, he answered that it was called an «epitaph»; and you argue that it would rightly be so called, if you had read there only the lives or writings of those who were already deceased;
but since the little works of many who were living both at the time when it was being written and still now are commemorated there, you wonder why I imposed this title upon it. I think your prudence understands that you could have understood the title from the work itself; for you have read both Greeks and Latins who described the lives of illustrious men, that they never wrote «epitaph» for such a work, but rather «On illustrious men»—for example, generals, philosophers, orators, historians, epic poets, tragic and comic poets. But an epitaph is properly written of the dead, which indeed I know I once did at the falling-asleep of Nepotian the presbyter, of holy memory.
Therefore this book ought to be called either «On illustrious men» or properly «On ecclesiastical writers», although by very many unskilled correctors it is said to be inscribed «On authors». In the second place you ask why I said, in my commentaries on the Epistle to the Galatians, that Paul could not have reprehended in Peter what he himself had done, nor rebuked in another a dissimulation of which he himself was held guilty; and you assert that the apostolic reprehension was not dispensatory but true, and that I ought not to teach a falsehood, but that all things which are written should sound as they are written. To which I first reply that your prudence ought to have remembered the little preface of my commentaries, which says, in my own person: «What then?»
Am I foolish or rash, to promise that which he could not? By no means! Rather in this I seem to myself more cautious and more timid, in that, sensing the weakness of my own strength, I followed the commentaries of Origen. For that man wrote five volumes properly on Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, and completed the tenth book of his Stromata with a treatise, in concise discourse, upon the explanation of it; he also composed various tracts and excerpts, which alone could suffice. I pass over Didymus, my seer, and the Laodicean lately gone forth from the church, and Alexander the old heretic, Eusebius of Emesa too, and Theodore of Heraclea, who themselves also left not a few commentaries upon this matter.
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equibusuelsipaucadecerperem, fieretaliquid, quodnonpenituscontemneretur. et, utsimpliciterfatear, legihaecomniaetinmentemeaplurimacoaceruansaccitonotariouelmeauelalienadictauinecordinisnecuerboruminterdumnecsensuummemor. iamdominimisericordiaeest, neperinperitiamnostramabaliisbenedictadispereantetnonplaceantinterextraneos, quaeplacentintersuos).
From these, if I should cull even a few things, something would result that would not be utterly despised. And, to confess simply, I read all these, and heaping up very many things in my mind, I summoned a shorthand-writer and dictated either my own things or others', mindful sometimes neither of order nor of words nor of meanings. It is now for the mercy of the Lord that, through my lack of skill, things well said by others should not perish, and that those things should not fail to please among strangers which please among their own.
If therefore you had thought anything worthy of reprehension in our explanation, it would have belonged to your erudition to inquire whether those things which we wrote were found in the Greeks, so that, if they had not said them, then you might properly condemn my own opinion—especially since in the preface I freely confessed that I had followed Origen's commentaries and had dictated either my own things or others', and at the end of the very chapter which you reprehend I wrote: «If this sense does not please anyone, by which neither Peter is shown to have sinned nor Paul to have insolently rebuked his elder, let him expound by what logic Paul reprehends in another that which he himself committed.» By which I showed that I do not defend as settled that which I had read in the Greeks, but that I set forth those things which I had read, so as to
leave it to the reader's judgment, whether they were to be approved or disapproved. You therefore, in order not to do what I had asked, discovered a new argument, to assert that the Gentiles who had believed in Christ were free of the burden of the law, but that those who believed from among the Jews were subject to the law; so that, through the persons of both, Paul rightly reprehended those who kept the law, as teacher of the Gentiles, and Peter was justly reprehended, who, as prince of the circumcision, commanded to the Gentiles that which only those who were of the Jews ought to observe. If this pleases—nay, since it does please—that whoever believe from among the Jews
are debtors to keep the law: you, as a bishop most well known in the whole world, ought to promulgate this opinion and draw all your fellow-bishops into your assent. I, in my little cottage with monks, that is, with my fellow-sinners, do not dare to determine about great matters, except to confess this ingenuously: that I read the writings of my elders, and in my commentaries, according to the custom of all, I set down various explanations, so that each one may follow from among the many what he will. Which indeed I think you have both read and approved, both in secular literature and in the divine books.