Wherefore, the fact that the rational principle of very many men is there does not pertain to man himself, although again, in wondrous ways, all things are brought back to one. But you will think this over more suitably. Be content with these things for the present, I beg, although I have now gone beyond Naevius. XV. AUGUSTINE TO ROMANIANUS. Does not this letter, by indicating in this way the scarcity of paper, at least bear witness that parchments abound? The ivory tablets which I have, I sent to your uncle with a letter. You, then, will the more readily forgive this little scrap of skin, because what I wrote to him could not be deferred, and I judged it most foolish not to write to you also. But the tablets, if any of ours are there, send me, I beg, for necessities of this kind.
I have written something concerning the Catholic religion, as far as the Lord has deigned to grant, which I wish to send you before my arrival, if paper is not lacking in the meantime. For you will put up with whatever sort of writing comes from the workshop of Maiorinus. As for the codices, except for the books 'On the Orator,' everything has slipped my memory. But I could write back nothing further than that you yourself should take whichever ones you please, and I still remain of the same mind. For being absent, I find nothing more that I might do. It is most gratifying to me that in your last letter you wished to make me a sharer in your household joy. But do you bid me to be ignorant of 'the face of the calm sea and the quiet waves'? And yet you would neither bid me to be so, nor would you yourself be ignorant of it. Therefore, if some quiet has been granted for thinking better thoughts, make use of the divine benefit.
For when these things come to pass, we ought not to congratulate ourselves, but those through whom they come about, since a just and dutiful administration of temporal affairs—one more peaceful and tranquil according to its kind—begets the merit of receiving eternal things, provided that it does not cling to them while it is held by them, does not entangle a man when it is multiplied, and does not enmesh him when it is reckoned. For it was spoken by the mouth of Truth itself: 'If you have not been faithful in what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?' Therefore, with the cares of mutable things loosened, let us seek goods that are stable and sure, and let us soar above our earthly riches. For even amid an abundance of honey the little bee does not have wings in vain; for the honey kills it when it clings fast.
Eager to be frequently gladdened by your addresses and stirred by the prompting of your discourse—since a little while ago, with charity preserved, you most delightfully provoked me—I have not ceased to render like for like, lest you should call my silence a sign of repentance. But I beg that, if you have judged these to be, as it were, the limbs of an old man, you would accompany them with the indulgence of kindly ears. Greece fabricates, under uncertain faith, that Mount Olympus is the dwelling of the gods. But we truly discern and prove that the forum of our city is possessed by a throng of salutary divinities. And indeed, that there is one supreme God, without beginning, without offspring, as it were the great and magnificent Father of nature—who is so insane, so bereft of mind, as to deny that this is most certain?
His powers, diffused throughout the fabric of the world, we invoke by many names, since we are all of course ignorant of his proper name. For 'god' is a name common to all religions. Thus it comes about that, while we honor piecemeal, as it were certain limbs of him, by various supplications, we evidently seem to worship the whole. But I cannot dissemble that I am impatient of so great an error. For who could endure that to Jupiter brandishing his thunderbolts there be preferred a Miggin; to Juno, Minerva, Venus, and Vesta a Sanaem; and to all the immortal gods—oh, the impiety!—the arch-martyr Namphamo?
Among whom Lucitas too is looked up to with no lesser cult, and others beyond all reckoning—names odious to gods and men—who, conscious of unspeakable crimes, heaping their own villainies upon villainies under the guise of a glorious death, defiled as they were, found an end worthy of their character and deeds. The tombs of these, if it is worth recalling, the foolish frequent—the temples abandoned, the shades of their own ancestors neglected—so that the foreboding of that bard, who bore it indignantly, stands out: 'And in the temples of the gods Rome will swear by phantoms.' But to me at this season it seems almost as though the Actian war has broken out anew, in which Egyptian monsters dare to hurl darts against the gods of the Romans—darts by no means destined to endure.
But this I beg, most wise man: that, with the force of eloquence laid aside and dismissed—by which you are renowned to all—and even those Chrysippean arguments omitted with which you used to do battle, and dialectic set aside a little (which by the wrestling of its own sinews strives to leave nothing certain to anyone), you would prove by the very fact who this God is, whom you Christians claim as it were for your own, and whom you compose yourselves to behold present in hidden places. For we worship our gods in the light, openly, before the eyes and ears of all mortals with pious prayers, and by sweet sacrificial victims we render them propitious to us, and we contend that these things are seen and approved by all.
But I, a feeble old man, now withdraw myself from this contest and gladly pass over to the opinion of the Mantuan rhetorician: 'Let each one's own pleasure draw him.' After this I do not doubt, eminent man—you who have strayed from my school—that this letter, filched away by someone's theft, will perish by fire or in some other fashion. But if this should happen, the loss will be of a scrap of paper, not of our discourse, a copy of which I shall keep forever in the keeping of all religious men. May the gods preserve you—through whom we all mortals, whom the earth sustains, in a thousand ways and with concordant discord venerate and worship both them and the common Father of all mortals. XVII. Are we conducting something serious between us, or does it please us to jest?
For, as your letter declares, I am uncertain whether it came about through the weakness of the cause itself, or through the affability of your manners, that you preferred to be more witty than well-prepared. For first a comparison of Mount Olympus and your forum was made, which I do not know what it served, unless to remind me both that Jupiter pitched his camp on that mountain when he waged war against his father—as that history teaches which yours even call sacred—and that in that forum I should recall there to be, among two statues, one Mars naked, the other armed, whose most hostile demon a human statue, placed opposite with three fingers extended, would hold in check for the citizens.
Could I ever, then, have believed that, by mentioning that forum, you wished to renew for me the memory of such divinities—unless you had chosen rather to jest than to act in earnest? But this one thing, plainly, that you called such gods certain limbs of the one great God, I admonish you—since you deign to accept it—that you greatly abstain from sacrilegious witticisms of this sort. If indeed you mean that one God concerning whom, as the ancients said, the learned and unlearned agree, do you say that these are his limbs, whose monstrousness—or, if you prefer, whose power—the image of a dead man already holds in check? I could say much more on this; for you see, in keeping with your prudence, how widely this topic lies open to reproof.
But I restrain myself, lest I be thought by you to act rhetorically rather than truthfully. For as to the fact that you collected certain Punic names of dead men, with which you supposed festive insults—as it seemed to you—were to be hurled against our religion, I do not know whether I ought to refute them or pass them over in silence. For if those matters seem to your gravity as trifling as they truly are, I have not much leisure to jest; but if they seem weighty to you, I wonder that, moved by the absurdity of names, it did not come into your mind that you have both among your priests the Eucaddires and among your divinities the Abaddires.
I do not suppose that these things were absent from your mind when you wrote; rather, in the manner of your humanity and your wit, you wished to remind us—for the relaxing of the mind—how many things in your superstition are laughable. For you could not so far have forgotten yourself that, an African writing to Africans (since we are both established in Africa), you should think Punic names worth deriding. For if we interpret those words, what else does 'Namphamo' signify than 'a man of good foot'? That is, one whose coming brings some happiness, just as we are wont to say that someone has entered 'with favorable foot,' whose entrance some prosperity has followed.
And if this language is disapproved by you, then deny that many things were wisely committed to memory in Punic books, as is reported by the most learned men; at the least, let it cause you regret to have been born there where the cradle of this tongue is still warm. But if our own sound does not unreasonably displease us, and you acknowledge that I have rightly interpreted that word, you have grounds for being vexed with your own Virgil, who invites your Hercules to the rites celebrated for him by Evander in this manner: 'Both upon us and upon thy rites do thou, propitious, draw near with favorable foot.' With favorable foot he wishes that he may come. Therefore he wishes Hercules-Namphamo to come, about whom you deign so greatly to mock us. Nevertheless, if it delights you to laugh, you have among yourselves great material for witticisms:
the god Stercutius, the goddess Cluacina, Venus Calva, the god Fear, the god Pallor, the goddess Fever, and countless others of this kind, to which the ancient Romans, worshipers of images, built temples and decreed that they be worshiped. If you neglect these, you neglect the Roman gods, from which it will be understood that you were not initiated into Roman rites; and yet you despise and look down upon Punic names as though excessively devoted to the altars of the Romans. But to me you seem altogether perhaps to value those rites at nothing more than we do, but to snatch from them some I-know-not-what pleasure for the passage of this life, since you did not even hesitate to take refuge in Maro, as you write, and to defend yourself by his verse, in which he says: 'His own pleasure draws each one.'
For if the authority of Maro pleases you, as you signify that it does, then surely this also pleases you: 'First came Saturn from heavenly Olympus, fleeing the arms of Jove and an exile from a kingdom taken from him,' and the rest, by which he means that this god and others of this kind among yours were men. For he had read the mystical history strengthened by ancient authority, which Tully too had read—who in his dialogues recalls this very thing more fully than we would dare to demand, and labors to bring it into the knowledge of men, as far as those times allowed.
But as to your saying that your rites are to be preferred to ours on the ground that you worship the gods publicly, while we make use of more secret assemblies—first I ask you this: how you have forgotten that Liber of yours, whom you hold must be committed only to the eyes of a few initiates. Then you yourself judge that you meant to do nothing else, in recalling the public celebration of your rites, than that we should set before our eyes, as in a mirror, the town-councilors and chief men of the city reveling and raging like Bacchants through the streets of your city. In which festival, if you are inhabited by a deity, surely you see what that is which robs the mind; but if you are feigning it, what then are these secrets of yours even in public? Or to what end such a base lie?
Then why do you sing of nothing future, if you are seers? Or why do you despoil the bystanders, if you are sane? Since, therefore, you have made us recall these things and others—which I now think should be passed over—through your letter, why should we deride your gods, whom no one fails to perceive are subtly derided by you yourself, who both knows your genius and has read your letters?
And so, if you wish that we treat of these matters between us in a manner befitting your age and prudence—a manner which, in keeping with our purpose, our dearest friends may rightly demand of us—then seek out something worthy of our discussion, and take care to say on behalf of your divinities such things as will not make us think you a betrayer of your own cause, in that you rather remind us of what may be said against them than say anything on their behalf. But, to sum up, lest this escape you and unawares draw you into sacrilegious revilings, you should know that by Catholic Christians—whose church is established even in your town—no dead person is worshiped, nothing finally is adored as a divinity that has been made and founded by God, but only God himself, who made and founded all things.
These things shall be discussed more fully, with the true and one God himself helping, when I shall have learned that you wish to treat the matter in earnest. XVIII. AUGUSTINE TO CAELESTINUS. Oh, that I could continually say something to you! And that 'something' is this: that we might be stripped of empty cares and clothed with useful ones. For as to security, I know not whether anything in this world is to be hoped for. I wrote and received no replies. I sent the books against the Manichaeans which I was able to send, ready and corrected, nor has anything of your judgment and reaction been made known to me. Now it is fitting that I should reclaim them and that you should restore them.
I ask, therefore, that you not delay to send them back together with replies, by which I desire to know what you are doing about them, or what equipment you think you still need for overthrowing that error. But since I know you, receive this, something grand and yet brief. There is a nature mutable through both places and times, such as the body; and there is a nature in no way mutable through places, but mutable only through times, such as the soul; and there is a nature that can be changed neither through places nor through times—this is God. What I have here intimated to be in any way mutable is called creature; what is immutable, the Creator.
But since of everything we say to exist, we say it exists in so far as it abides and in so far as it is one, and since, moreover, the form of all beauty is the form of unity, you assuredly see, in this ordering of natures, what is in the highest degree, what is in the lowest yet still is, and what is in the middle—more than the lowest and less than the highest. That highest is blessedness itself; the lowest can be neither blessed nor wretched; but that which is the middle lives wretchedly by inclining toward the lowest, and lives blessedly by turning toward the highest. He who believes in Christ does not love the lowest, is not proud in the middle, and thus becomes fit to cleave to the highest. And this is the whole of what we are commanded, admonished, and inflamed to do. XIX. AUGUSTINE TO GAIUS.
From the time we departed from you, it cannot be told with how great a sweetness the recollection of you has suffused us, and often suffuses us still. For we recall that, in the ardor of your inquiry—marvelous though it was—the modesty of your disputation was never disturbed. For I could not easily find anyone either more ardently inquiring or more tranquilly listening. And so I would gladly speak much with you; for however much it might be, it would not seem much, if I were speaking with you. But since this is difficult, what need is there to seek out causes? It is utterly difficult. Perhaps someday it will be most easy—if God so wills—; now certainly it is otherwise. I have therefore given a charge to the brother through whom I sent this letter, that he should offer all our writings to be read by your most prudent charity.
For he will not force anything of mine upon you against your will; for I know what kindness you bear in your heart toward us. Yet if, having read these things, you should approve them and perceive them to be true, do not think them to be ours—except in that they were given to us—and you may turn yourself thither, whence it was granted to you also that you should approve them. For no one discerns what he reads to be true in the codex itself, or in him who wrote it, but rather in himself, if upon his mind there has been impressed a certain light of truth, uncommonly clear and most far removed from the dregs of the body. But if you should find anything false and to be disapproved, know that it has been bedewed from the human cloud, and reckon those things to be truly ours. I would urge you to seek further, did I not seem to myself to see certain gaping mouths of your heart;
I would also urge that what you have come to know as true you hold fast like a man, did you not display before yourself the most evident strength of mind and counsel. For in a short time the whole of what lives in you revealed itself to me, the coverings of the body, as it were, almost shaken off. Nor would the most merciful providence of our Lord by any means have permitted that you—a man so good and excellently sound of heart—should be a stranger to the catholic flock of Christ. XX. AUGUSTINE TO ANTONINUS. Since writings were owed to you from two of us, the part rendered has been more than abundant, for you behold one of us present; and since from his mouth you receive me as well, I might have not written back, had I not done so at his bidding—although, as he was setting out, what I have done seemed superfluous.
Wherefore I perhaps converse more fruitfully with you than if I were present in person, since you both read my letter and hear him in whose breast you know full well that I dwell. With great joy I considered and pondered the letter of your holiness, since it displays your Christian spirit, without any disguise, amid these iniquitous times, and most friendly toward us. I congratulate you and give thanks to God and our Lord for your hope and faith and charity, and for yourself in his sight—because you think so well of us as to believe us to be faithful servants of God, and because you love this very thing in us with a most pure heart. And yet for this too your goodwill is rather to be congratulated than to have thanks given to it.
For it profits you to love goodness itself, which surely he loves who loves him whom he believes to be good—whether that man be such, or be otherwise than he is believed to be. In this matter only one error is to be guarded against: that anyone should think about the good of man—not about the man himself—otherwise than truth demands. But you indeed, most beloved brother, who in no way err in believing or knowing it to be a great good to serve God willingly and chastely, if you therefore love any man because you believe him a partaker of this good, your fruit is with you, even if he is not such. Wherefore you are to be congratulated in this matter; but he is not—if he is loved on that ground—but only if he is such as the one by whom he is therefore loved esteems him to be.
Of what sort, then, we are, and how far we have advanced toward God, he himself will see, whose judgment can err neither about the good of a man nor about the man himself. For you, as regards the reward of blessedness in so far as it pertains to this matter, it is enough that, believing us to be such as the servants of God ought to be, you embrace us with the whole bosom of your heart. But we give you abundant thanks, because, when you praise us as though we were such, you marvelously exhort us to desire to be such; and we give yet more abundant thanks, if you not only commend yourself to our prayers, but also do not neglect to pray for us. For more pleasing to God is the intercession made on a brother's behalf, where the sacrifice of charity is offered.
I greet your little one most warmly, and I wish, according to the salutary precepts of the Lord, that he may grow up. To your household too I desire and pray that there may come the one faith and the true devotion, which alone is catholic. In this matter, if you perchance think any other service of ours to be needful, do not hesitate to claim it for yourself, relying both upon the common Lord and upon the right of charity. This indeed I would admonish your most religious prudence: that you should either implant not an irrational fear of God in your weaker vessel, or nourish it by divine reading and weighty conversation.
For scarcely anyone who is solicitous about the state of his soul, and on that account intent—without obstinacy—upon inquiring the will of the Lord, having made use of a good guide, fails to discern what difference there is between any schism whatsoever and the one Catholic Church. XXI. TO THE MOST BLESSED LORD, AND VENERABLE, AND IN THE SIGHT OF THE LORD MOST DEAR WITH SINCERE CHARITY, FATHER VALERIUS THE BISHOP, AUGUSTINE THE PRESBYTER, GREETING IN THE LORD. Before all things, I ask that your religious prudence consider that there is nothing in this life—and especially at this time—easier, more pleasant, and more acceptable to men than the office of a bishop or presbyter or deacon, if it be carried out perfunctorily and with flattery; but nothing more wretched, more sorrowful, and more damnable before God.
Likewise, that there is nothing in this life—and especially at this time—more difficult, more laborious, more perilous than the office of a bishop or presbyter or deacon; but before God nothing more blessed, if one serves as a soldier in that manner which our Commander bids. But what that manner is, I learned neither in my boyhood nor in my youth. And at the very time when I had begun to learn it, force was done to me—deservedly for my sins, for what else I should suppose I know not—that the second place at the helm should be handed over to me, who had not known even how to hold an oar. But I think that my Lord wished by this means to correct me, because I had dared to reprove the sins of many sailors, before I had myself experienced what goes on there, as though I were more learned and better.
And so, after I had been sent into the midst of it, then I began to feel the rashness of my reproofs—although even before I had judged this ministry most perilous. And hence came those tears which some of the brethren observed me pouring forth at the newness of my ordination; and, not knowing the causes of my grief, with such words as they could—which by no means touched my wound—they nevertheless consoled me with good intention.
But I experienced far, far more than I had supposed—not because I saw any new waves or tempests which I had not seen before, or had not heard of, or had not read of, or had not imagined, but because, for avoiding or enduring them, I had not known my own skill and strength at all, and yet had reckoned myself to be of some account. The Lord, however, laughed at me, and willed by the very facts to show me to myself. But if he did this not by condemning but by pitying me—for this, certainly, I now hope, my sickness being at last recognized—then I ought to search thoroughly all the medicines of his Scriptures, and by praying and reading to labor that a health of soul fit for such perilous affairs may be granted to me. This I had not done before, both because I had not the time;
for I was ordained at the very time when we were planning to use a season of leisure for coming to know the divine Scriptures, and wished so to dispose ourselves that there might be free time for this business. What is more, I did not yet know what I lacked for such a work as now torments and crushes me. But if for this reason I have learned in the very experience what is necessary for a man who ministers to the people the sacrament and the word of God—so that now it is no longer permitted me to attain what I have come to know I do not possess—do you then bid me to perish, father Valerius? Where is your charity? Surely you love me? Surely you love the very church which you have willed that I should so minister to? And yet I am sure that you love both me and it.
But you think me fit, though I know myself better—I who nevertheless did not even know myself, until I had learned by experience. But perhaps your holiness will say: I should like to know what is wanting to your equipment. The things are so many that I could more easily enumerate what I have than what I desire to have. For I would dare to say that I know, and hold with full faith, what pertains to our salvation. But this very thing—how am I to administer it for the salvation of others, seeking not what is useful to me, but what is useful to many, that they may be saved?
And there are perhaps certain counsels—nay, it is not to be doubted that there are counsels written in the holy books—which, once known and grasped, enable the man of God to minister in ecclesiastical matters in a more orderly way, or at the very least, among the hands of the wicked, either to live with a sounder conscience or to die, so that that life be not lost, after which alone humble and meek Christian hearts sigh. But how can this be done, except—as the Lord himself says—by asking, seeking, and knocking; that is, by praying, reading, and lamenting? For which business I wished to obtain a little time—up to Easter, as it were—through the brethren, from your most sincere and venerable charity; and now I wish it through these entreaties. For what shall I answer to the Lord, my Judge?
'Could I not have sought these things already, since I was hindered by ecclesiastical affairs?' If, then, he should say to me: 'Wicked servant, if a farm of the church were suffering some slanderous claimant, on the gathering of whose fruits great labor is expended while the field is neglected which I watered with my blood, and if you could do anything for it before the judge of the earth, would you not, with all consenting and some even bidding and compelling, set out—and if it were decided against you, would you not journey even across the sea? And in this manner no complaint would call back your absence of a year or more, lest another should possess land necessary not to the soul but to the body of the poor—whose hunger nevertheless my living trees, if they were diligently tended, would satisfy far more easily and more gratefully to me.'
'Why, then, do you allege as an excuse that you lacked leisure of time for learning my husbandry?' Tell me what I am to answer; I beg you. Or perhaps you would have me say: 'The aged Valerius, while he believed me to be furnished in all things, the more he loved me, the less he permitted me to learn these matters'? Give heed to all these things, aged Valerius. I beseech you, by the goodness and the severity of Christ, by his mercy and his judgment, by him who breathed into you so great a charity toward us, that we dare not offend you even for the gain of our soul. And so you make the Lord and Christ a witness to me of the innocence and charity and sincere affection which you have toward us, as though I could not swear to all these things myself.
I therefore implore that very charity and affection, that you would have mercy on me and grant me, for the purpose I have asked, as much time as I have asked, and that you would help me by your prayers, so that my desire may not be in vain, nor my absence unfruitful to the church of Christ and to the benefit of the brethren and my fellow-servants. I know that the Lord does not despise that charity which prays on my behalf, especially in such a cause, and that, accepting it as a sacrifice of sweetness, he will perhaps in a shorter time than I have asked render me equipped with the most salutary counsels from his Scriptures. XXII.
TO AURELIUS THE BISHOP, AUGUSTINE THE PRESBYTER. With what grace I might reply to the letter of your holiness, since long hesitating I could not find—for the affection of my mind overcame all, which, now rising of its own accord, the reading of your letter excited far more ardently—nevertheless I committed myself to God, who would work in me according to my strength, that I might write back such things as would befit both of us, in zeal in the Lord and in ecclesiastical care, in keeping with your excellence and my compliance. And first of all, that you believe yourself to be helped by my prayers: not only do I not shrink from it, but I even gladly embrace it. For thus, even if not by mine, yet certainly by yours, our Lord will hear me.