And that you may not think this false, in the manner of an orator I shall, after arguments, call witnesses. Holy brother Heliodorus was here, who, when he wished to inhabit the desert with me, was put to flight by my crimes and departed. But my present verbosity will excuse all fault. For, as Flaccus says in his satire: this is a fault common to all singers, that among friends, when asked, they never sing, and, unbidden, they never leave off. So henceforth I shall overwhelm you with bundles of letters, that on the contrary you may begin to beg me not to write. My sister, your daughter in Christ, I rejoice — you being the first to announce it — that she remains in that state in which she had begun. For here, where I now am, I am ignorant not only of what is being done in my homeland, but whether my homeland itself still stands.
And although the Iberian viper may tear me with sinister rumour, I shall not fear the judgement of men, since I shall have my own Judge: if the shattered world should fall in, its ruins will strike him undaunted. Wherefore I ask that, mindful of the apostolic precept by which he teaches that our work ought to endure, you both prepare for yourself a reward from the Lord in her salvation, and make me, by frequent letters, gladder concerning our common glory in Christ. VII. TO CHROMATIUS, JOVINUS, EUSEBIUS. Paper ought not to divide those whom mutual love has joined, nor should the offices of my discourse be parcelled out among individuals, since you so love one another that love joins three no less than nature has associated two.
Rather, if the condition of the matter allowed, I would enclose your undivided names under one little stroke of the pen — you provoking me by your letters in such a way that I reckoned three in one and one in three. For after they were delivered to me, sent by holy Evagrius, into that part of the desert which leads a vast frontier between Syrians and Saracens, I so rejoiced that I outdid that day of Roman felicity on which, in the battle of Marcellus at Nola, after the fight of Cannae, the proud columns of Hannibal first fell. And although the aforesaid brother often visits me and so cherishes me as his own bowels in Christ, yet, being sundered from me by a long space, he has left me by his departing no less longing than he had brought by his coming of gladness.
Now I converse with your letters, I embrace them, they speak with me, they alone here know Latin. For here one must either learn the barbarous speech of the old man, or be silent. As often as familiar hands bring back to me faces most dear, in the traces they have impressed, so often either I am not here or you are here. Believe love, which speaks the truth: even as I was writing this, I saw you. And of this I first complain — why, with so many spaces of sea and lands lying between, you sent so small a letter — unless it be that I have thus deserved it, who did not write to you first, as you say. I do not think paper was lacking, since Egypt supplies the trade.
And even if some Ptolemy had closed the seas, yet King Attalus sent parchments from Pergamum, so that the scarcity of paper might be compensated by skins; whence the name of parchment has been preserved to this very day, posterity handing it down to one another in turn. What then? Shall I suppose the carrier hastened? Yet one night suffices for however long a letter. Or that you were detained by some occupation? No necessity is greater than love. Two things remain: that either it wearied you, or I did not deserve it. Of these I prefer to charge you with slowness than to condemn myself as undeserving. For negligence can more easily be amended than love be born. Bonosus, as you write, like a son of Bacchus
has sought the watery places, while we, foul with our former contagion, like basilisks and scorpions pursue whatever is parched. He already treads upon the serpent's head, while we are still food for the serpent that eats earth by the divine sentence. He can already climb the highest step of the psalm, while we, still weeping on the first ascent, know not whether it may ever befall us to say: I have lifted up my eyes unto the mountains, whence help shall come to me. He, amid the menacing waves of the world, sitting in the safe bosom of the island — that is, of the Church — after the example of John, perhaps already devours the book; while I, lying in the sepulchre of my crimes and bound with the chains of my sins, await the Lord's cry from the Gospel: 'Jerome, come forth.'
Bonosus, I say — because according to the prophet all the strength of the devil is in the loins — carried his girdle across the Euphrates, there hiding it in a cleft of the rock, and afterwards, finding it rent, sang: 'Lord, Thou hast possessed my reins; Thou hast burst my bonds; to Thee I will sacrifice the victim of praise.' But a true Nebuchadnezzar led me in chains to Babylon — that is, to the confusion of my mind; there he laid upon me the yoke of captivity, there, fastening the iron ring, he bade me sing of the songs of Zion. To whom I said: the Lord looses the bound, the Lord enlightens the blind. And, to end briefly the comparison I began: I entreat pardon, he awaits the crown. My sister is holy Julian's fruit in Christ:
he planted, you water, the Lord will give the increase. This one Jesus granted to me alive, in place of that wound which the devil had inflicted, restoring her living in place of one dead. For her, as the pagan poet says, I fear all things, even things safe. You yourselves know the slippery path of youth, in which both I have fallen and you have passed not without fear. As she now more than ever enters upon it, she must be propped by everyone's precepts, sustained by everyone's comforts — that is, strengthened by the frequent letters of your holiness. And because love bears all things, I beseech that you also demand from Pope Valerian letters to comfort her. You know that girlish spirits are for the most part made firm by these things, if they perceive themselves to be a care to their elders.
For in my homeland, the vernacular of rusticity, the belly is God, and men live for the day: the holier a man is, the richer he is. To this dish there has been added a lid worthy of it, according to the proverb worn common in the people's speech — the priest Lupicinus (according also to that saying at which Lucilius says Crassus once in his life laughed: 'the lips have a lettuce like themselves, when a thistle is the ass's food') — namely, that a feeble helmsman should steer a leaking ship, and a blind man lead the blind into the ditch, and such be the ruler as those who are ruled. Our common mother — who, though she is joined to you in holiness, yet in this outstrips you, that she bore such children, and whose belly may truly be called golden — we salute with that honour which you know;
and together your sisters, worthy to be looked up to by all, who have overcome their sex together with the world, who, with oil abundantly prepared for their lamps, await the Bridegroom's coming. O blessed house, in which dwell Anna the widow, the virgin prophetesses, the twin Samuel nurtured in the temple! O happy dwellings, in which we behold a martyr mother girt with the crowns of the Maccabean martyrs! For although you daily confess Christ by keeping His precepts, yet to your private glory this public and open confession has been added: that through you the poison of the once-Arian dogma was expelled from your city. And you may perhaps wonder that at the very end of the letter I have begun again. What shall I do? I cannot deny my voice to my heart.
The brevity of the letter compels me to be silent, longing for you forces me to speak. My speech is over-hasty; my discourse is confusedly disturbed; love knows no order. VIII. TO NICEAS THE SUBDEACON OF AQUILEIA. 'A letter,' one says, 'is the thing that makes absent men present.' Nor did he give a false judgement, though in a matter not true. For what, so to speak, is so present among the absent as, through letters, both to address and to hear those whom you love? For even those rude men of Italy, whom Ennius calls 'casci,' who, as Cicero says in his Rhetorica, sought their livelihood for themselves with wild fare, before the use of paper and parchments, sent mutual exchanges of letters either upon little tablets hewn from wood or upon the bark of trees;
whence they called the carriers of these 'tabellarii' (tablet-men) and the writers 'librarii' from the bark (liber) of trees. How much more, then, ought we not to omit, in a world now polished by the arts, that which they furnished for themselves, among whom there was raw rusticity and who in a certain sense knew not civility! Behold, the blessed Chromatius, together with holy Eusebius, a brother to himself no more by nature than by an equality of character, has provoked me to the office of letters. You alone, going away from us, rather rend than unstitch a fresh friendship — which Laelius wisely forbids — unless perhaps the East is so hateful to you that you dread even your letters coming hither.
Awake, awake, rouse yourself from sleep, furnish one little scrap of paper to love, amid the delights of your homeland and the sighs of the common pilgrimage which we once had. If you love me, write back; if you are angry, write even though angry. I shall count this too a great solace of my longing, if I receive a friend's letters, even of one indignant. IX. TO THE MONK CHRYSOCOMAS OF AQUILEIA. Heliodorus could have faithfully reported to you — who loves you with no less love than I love — how I always sound your name in my mouth, how at every first conversation I recall the memory of your most delightful fellowship with me, how I marvel at your humility, extol your virtue, proclaim your love. But you — what lynxes have by nature
that, not looking back behind them, they remember the former things and the mind loses what the eyes have ceased to see — thus, utterly forgetful of our bond, you have erased that letter which the Apostle says is written in the heart of Christians, not with a swift smudge, but, as they say, down to the very depths of the wax. And those wild beasts we spoke of, lurking beneath the leafy bough of a tree, seize the fleeing she-goats or the timid deer, an animal that runs in vain a prey while, secure, it bears its own enemy, and from above tear it with rabid mouth; and they remember to prey only so long as an empty belly with hunger galls the dry throat;
but when the sated ferocity has filled its distended entrails, then with satiety comes forgetfulness, not to know what it may seize, until hunger recalls the memory. You, not yet sated with us, why do you join the end to the beginning? Why do you let go before you hold fast? Unless perhaps, with negligence always your excuse-companion, you assert that you had nothing to write about — when you ought to have written this very thing, that you had nothing else to write about. X. TO THE AGED PAULUS OF CONCORDIA. The brevity of human life is a condemnation of our offences, and death, often following the newborn at the very threshold of light, declares that the ages are daily slipping into vice.
For when the serpent had led down to earth the first colonist of paradise, entangled in viperous coils, eternity, changed into mortality, had deferred the sentence of the accursed man into nine hundred years and more — a kind of second immortality. Thenceforth, with sin gradually growing rank again, the impiety of the giants brought the shipwreck of the whole world. After that baptism, so to speak, of the purified world, the life of men was contracted into a brief span. This span too, with our crimes ever fighting against the divine, we have almost lost. For how rare is anyone who either passes the hundredth year of age, or does not so reach it that he repents of having reached it — according to that which in the book of Psalms the Scripture testifies:
the days of our life are seventy years, but if much, eighty; whatever remains is labour and sorrow? 'To what end,' you say, 'these things fetched from so lofty a beginning and started so far off, that anyone might rightly make sport of us with Horatian wit: and he begins the Trojan war from the twin egg?' Namely, that with worthy words I may proclaim your old age and your head, white after the likeness of Christ. Behold, now the circle of a hundred years' age is rolling round, and you, ever keeping the Lord's precepts, meditate upon the future blessedness of life through the examples of things present. Your eyes are vigorous with pure light, your feet impress sure footprints, your hearing is penetrating, your teeth white, your voice tuneful, your body solid and full of sap.
Your white hairs are at variance with your ruddiness, your vigour dissents from your age. Advancing old age has not, as we see in most, dissolved the tenacity of memory; cold blood has not dulled the keenness of a warm wit; a furrowed brow does not roughen a face contracted with wrinkles; nor, finally, does a trembling hand guide the wandering stylus along the curving paths of the wax. In you the Lord shows us the green freshness of the future resurrection, that we may know it belongs to sin that others, still living, die beforehand in the flesh, and to righteousness that you counterfeit youth at another's age. And although we see this bodily health befall many, even sinners, yet to them the devil supplies it, that they may sin; to you the Lord bestows it, that you may rejoice.
The most learned of the Greeks — concerning whom Tullius, pleading for Flaccus, eloquently says: 'innate levity and learned vanity' — used to utter the praises of their kings or princes for a fee received. Doing this now, I demand a price for my praises. And that you may not think what I entreat to be trifling, you would have asked for a pearl from the Gospel: the words of the Lord are chaste words, silver tried by fire for the earth, purified sevenfold — namely, the commentaries of Fortunatianus, and, for knowledge of the persecutors, the history of Aurelius Victor, and at the same time the letters of Novatian, so that, while we come to know the poisons of the schismatic man, we may the more gladly drink the antidote of the holy martyr Cyprian.
Meanwhile I have sent you, that is to Paul the aged, Paul the elder, in which, for the sake of the simpler folk, I have labored much to bring my style down low. Yet somehow, even when it is filled with water, the flask still keeps the same smell with which it was steeped while still raw. If this little gift please you, I have other things stored up as well, which, if the Holy Spirit breathe favorably, shall sail to you along with a great store of Eastern merchandise. XI. To the Virgins of Haemona. I have compressed my discourse into a brief compass, because, though I wished to speak with you more at length, the narrowness of the sheet compelled me to be silent. Now therefore poverty has been overcome by wit. The letters are indeed tiny, but the conversation is long.
And yet in this strait of necessity mark my love, since not even the scarcity of writing-material could prevent me from writing. But do you, I beseech you, pardon one who grieves; for I speak as one wounded, I speak weeping and angry: you have not rendered so much as a single stroke to one who has so often paid you the service of a letter. I know that there is no fellowship of light with darkness, no partnership of the handmaids of God with sinners; yet the harlot too washed the Lord's feet with her tears, and the dogs eat of their masters' crumbs, and the Savior himself came not to call the righteous but sinners. For they that are whole need not a physician; and he prefers the sinner's repentance to his death, and carries the straying little ewe back upon his shoulders, and the joyful father received the prodigal son on his return.
Nay rather, the Apostle says: Judge nothing before the time. For who art thou that judgest another's servant? To his own master he standeth or falleth; and: Let him that standeth take heed lest he fall; and: Bear ye one another's burdens. In one way, dearest sisters, does the envy of men judge, in another way Christ. The verdict of his tribunal is not the same as that of the whispering corner. Many ways seem right to men, and afterward are found perverse; and treasure is often stored away in vessels of clay. Peter, thrice denying, was restored by his bitter tears to his place. To whom more is forgiven, he loveth more. Of the whole flock nothing is said, and for the salvation of one sick sheep the angels rejoice in heaven. But if this seem to any one unworthy, let him hear from the Lord:
Friend, if I am good, why is thine eye evil? XII. To Antony the Monk at Haemona. He took one of the little ones from among the disciples, saying: Whosoever of you shall not be converted as a little child, cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. And that he might not seem only to teach and not to do this, he fulfilled it by example, when he washed the feet of his disciples, when he received the traitor with a kiss, when he spoke with the Samaritan woman, when he discoursed of the kingdom of heaven while Mary sat at his feet, when, rising from the dead, he appeared first to poor little women. But Satan fell from his archangelic height for no other cause than the pride that is contrary to humility.
And the Jewish people, claiming for themselves the chief seats and the salutations in the marketplace, was blotted out, while the Gentile people, once reckoned as a drop of the bucket, succeeded in their place. Against the sophists too of the age and the wise of the world, Peter and James the fisherman are sent; and for this cause the Scripture says: God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble. See, brother, how great an evil it is, which has God for its adversary. For which cause, in the Gospel, the arrogant Pharisee is spurned, and the humble publican is heard. Ten letters now, unless I am mistaken, full as much of duty as of entreaty, have I sent, while you do not deign to utter so much as a mutter; and, though the Lord speaks with us, you, a brother, will not speak with your brother. "Too insultingly," you will say.
Believe me, did not the modesty of my pen restrain me, so wounded am I that I would heap up such things as would make you begin to write back to me, even in anger. But since to be angry is human, and to do no wrong is Christian, returning to my old custom I again entreat you that you love one who loves you, and that as a fellow-servant you impart speech to your fellow-servant. XIII. To Castorina, my Maternal Aunt. John, the same apostle and evangelist, says in his epistle: Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer, and rightly. For since murder often is born of hatred, whosoever hateth, even though he has not yet struck with the sword, is nevertheless a murderer in his soul. "Why," you say, "such a beginning?" Namely, that, laying aside our old rancor, we may prepare for God a pure dwelling-place in the heart.
Be angry, says David, and sin not. What this means to be understood, the Apostle interprets more fully: Let not the sun go down upon your wrath. What shall we do in the day of judgment, over whose anger the sun has set as witness, not of one day, but of so many years? The Lord speaks in the Gospel: If thou offer thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go first to be reconciled to thy brother, and then offer thy gift. Woe is me, wretched — not to say to you also — who for so long a time either have not offered a gift at the altar, or, with anger abiding, have offered it without cause! How have we ever said in our daily prayer:
Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors, while our mind is at variance with our words, and our prayer at odds with our deeds? I entreat you, therefore — as also more than a year ago I had asked in earlier letters — that we may have that peace which the Lord left to us. Christ beholds both my longing and your mind: shortly, before his tribunal, our concord, whether restored or torn asunder, shall either recover its reward or its penalty. But if you — which God forbid — should be unwilling, I shall be free; this letter, when it has been read, shall absolve me. XIV. To Heliodorus the Monk. With what zeal and love I strove that we might dwell together in the desert, the heart that is conscious of our mutual charity knows.
With what laments, with what grief, with what groaning I followed you as you departed, these very letters also bear witness, which you see blotted with tears. But you, like a spoiled little child, cherished with caresses your contempt of the one who begged you; and I, unwary, knew not then what I should do. Should I keep silent? But what I ardently did not wish, I could not with moderation dissemble. Should I entreat more urgently? But you would not hear, because in like manner you did not love. Slighted love did the one thing it could. It seeks him absent whom it could not keep present. Since therefore you yourself also, on departing, had asked that, after I had removed to the desert, I should send you an invitation written by me, and I had undertaken that I would do so — I invite you: now make haste.
I would not have you recall your former ties — the desert loves the naked; I would not have the hardship of the old journey terrify you. You who believe in Christ, believe also his words: Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you. You need take neither wallet nor staff; he is abundantly rich who is poor with Christ. But what am I doing? Do I again entreat improvidently? Away with prayers, let caresses depart; wounded love ought to be angry. You who had scorned me entreating, perhaps you will hear me chiding. What are you doing in your father's house, delicate soldier? Where is the rampart, where the trench, where the winter spent under skins of hide?
Behold, from heaven the trumpet sounds; behold, the armed Commander comes forth with the clouds to make war upon the world; behold, the two-edged sword proceeding from the King's mouth mows down whatever meets it: and do you go for me from your bedchamber to the battle-line, from the shade out into the sun? A body accustomed to a tunic cannot bear the weight of a breastplate; a head covered with fine linen refuses the helmet; a hand grown soft with idleness is chafed by the hard hilt. Hear the edict of your King: He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth. Recall the day of your enlistment, when, buried with Christ in baptism, you swore upon the words of the sacrament that for his name you would spare neither mother nor father. Behold, the adversary within your breast strives to slay Christ;
behold, the hostile camp sighs after the bounty which you had received as one about to serve. Though your little nephew hang upon your neck, though with hair disheveled and garments rent your mother show the breasts at which she nursed you, though your father lie across the threshold, trample your father underfoot and go on; fly with dry eyes to the standard of the cross! In this matter it is a kind of piety to be cruel. A day will come afterward when you shall return victorious to your homeland, when as a valiant man, crowned, you shall march into the heavenly Jerusalem. Then with Paul you shall receive citizenship; then for your parents too you shall seek the right of the same city; then you shall pray for me also, who urged you on that you might conquer. Nor indeed am I ignorant of what fetter you now say holds you back.
We have no breast of iron nor hard heart-strings; Hyrcanian tigresses did not nurse us, born of flint. We too have passed through these things. Now a widowed sister clings to you with fond arms; now the home-born slaves with whom you grew up say: "To whom do you leave us to serve?"; now she who once carried you, already an old woman, and your foster-father, second in tenderness after your natural parent, cry aloud: "Wait a little for us who are about to die, and bury us." Perhaps too your nurse, with the loose skin of her sagging breasts and her brow furrowed with wrinkles, recalling the old days, redoubles her lullaby. Let the grammarians say too, if they will: Upon you the whole tottering house leans. The love of Christ and the fear of hell easily break these bonds. But Scripture, you say, commands that parents be obeyed:
But whosoever loves them above Christ loses his own soul. The enemy holds a sword to slay me, and shall I be thinking of my mother's tears? Shall I desert the warfare for my father's sake, to whom I owe no burial for Christ's sake — nay, whom for Christ's sake I owe to all men? Peter, timidly counseling the Lord who was about to suffer, was a stumbling-block. Paul, to the brethren who held him back from going to Jerusalem, replied: What do ye, weeping and troubling my heart? For I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. This battering-ram of family affection, by which faith is shaken, must be beaten back with the wall of the Gospel: My mother and my brethren are these, whosoever do the will of my Father who is in heaven.
If they believe in Christ, let them favor me who am about to fight for his name; if they do not believe, let the dead bury their own dead. "But this," you say, "applies to martyrdom." You err, brother, you err, if you think that a Christian ever fails to suffer persecution; and now most of all you are assailed, if you do not know that you are being assailed. Our adversary, like a roaring lion, goes about seeking someone to devour, and do you think it is peace? He sitteth in ambush with the rich in secret places, that he may kill the innocent; his eyes are set upon the poor; he lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den; he lieth in wait to seize the poor: and do you, sheltered by the shade of a leafy tree, gather soft slumbers — a future prey?
From this side lust pursues me, from that side avarice tries to break in, from another my belly wishes to be my god in place of Christ, sensuality compels me to put to flight the Holy Spirit dwelling within me, to violate his temple; the enemy pursues me, I say, whose names are a thousand, whose arts of doing harm a thousand: and shall I, wretched, count myself a victor while I am being taken captive? I would not, dearest brother, that when you have weighed the burden of sins you should reckon that the crimes we have named are lesser than idolatry; nay, learn the Apostle's sentence, who says: For this ye know, understanding, that no fornicator, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, which is idolatry, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of God and of Christ.
And although in general whatever belongs to the devil savors against God, and what belongs to the devil is idolatry — to which all idols are made over — yet in another place too he specifically and by name defines it, saying: Mortify your members which are upon the earth, putting off fornication, uncleanness, and evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which are the service of idols, on account of which cometh the wrath of God. Not only in this is there the service of an idol — if someone should cast incense taken up with two little fingers upon the fire of the altar, or pour out unmixed wine drawn in a saucer. Let him deny that avarice is idolatry who can call it justice that the Lord was sold for thirty pieces of silver;
let him deny that there is sacrilege in lust — but only he who has violated the members of Christ and a living sacrifice pleasing to God, together with the victims of public lusts, in a monstrous defilement; let him not confess such men to be idolaters, but like unto those who, in the Acts of the Apostles, reserving out of their patrimony a part of the price, perished by present vengeance. Take heed, brother: it is not lawful for you to keep anything of your own possessions. Everyone, says the Lord, who does not renounce all that he possesses, cannot be my disciple. Why are you a Christian with a fearful heart? Look at the net left behind with the father; look at the publican rising from the tax-booth, straightway an apostle. The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head: and do you measure out spacious porticoes and vast expanses of roofs?