'Truth has sprung up out of the earth' — a grove used to overshadow Thammuz, that is, Adonis, and in the cave where once the infant Christ wailed, the paramour of Venus was bewailed. 'To what end,' you will say, 'have these things been recalled from so long a preamble?' Doubtless so that you may not think anything is lacking to your faith because you have not seen Jerusalem, nor esteem us the better on this account, that we enjoy the habitation of this place, but that, whether here or elsewhere, you may have from our God an equal reward for your works.
In truth, to confess plainly the movement of my mind, considering both your purpose and the ardor with which you renounced the world, I do think there is a difference in places, if, forsaking cities and the throng of cities, you dwell in a little field and seek Christ in solitude and pray alone on the mountain with Jesus, and enjoy only the nearness of the holy places — that is, so that you both are free of the city and do not lose the purpose of a monk.
What I say, I say not of bishops, not of presbyters, not of clerics, whose office is other, but of a monk, and of a monk once noble in the world's esteem, who for this reason laid the price of his possessions at the feet of the apostles, teaching that money is to be trodden underfoot, that, living humbly and in secret, he might ever despise what he had once despised. If the places of the cross and resurrection were not in a most crowded city, in which there is a court, in which there is a company of soldiers, in which there are harlots, mimes, buffoons, and all the things that are wont to be in other cities, or if it were frequented only by throngs of monks, then indeed such a habitation would be worth seeking for all monks;
but as it is, it is the height of folly to renounce the world, to leave one's country, to desert cities, to profess oneself a monk, and to live abroad among greater crowds than you would have lived among in your own land. People flock hither from the whole world; the city is full of men of every kind, and there is so great a press of both sexes that what you were fleeing in part elsewhere, here you are forced to endure in full. Therefore, since you ask me in brotherly fashion by what way you ought to walk, I will speak to you with unveiled face. If you wish to exercise the office of a presbyter, if perchance the work or the honor of the episcopate delights you, live in cities and towns, and make the salvation of others the gain of your own soul.
But if you desire to be what you are called, a monk, that is, one alone, what do you do in cities, which are surely not dwellings of solitaries, but of the many? Each way of life has its own princes: let Roman generals imitate the Camilli, the Fabricii, the Reguli, the Scipios; let philosophers set before themselves Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; let poets emulate Homer, Virgil, Menander, Terence; historians Thucydides, Sallust, Herodotus, Livy; orators Lysias, the Gracchi, Demosthenes, Cicero; and, to come to our own, let bishops and presbyters have as their examples the apostles and apostolic men; and possessing their honor, let them strive to have their merit also.
But we have as the princes of our own purpose the Pauls, the Antonies, the Julians, the Hilarions, the Macarii; and, to return to the authority of the Scriptures, our prince is Elijah, ours Elisha, our leaders are the sons of the prophets, who dwelt in the fields and the wilderness and made themselves tents beside the streams of the Jordan. Of these too are those sons of Rechab, who drank neither wine nor strong drink, who abode in tents, who are praised by the voice of God through Jeremiah, and to whom it is promised that there shall not fail of their stock a man standing before the Lord. This too I think the title of the seventieth psalm signifies: 'Of the sons of Jonadab and of those who were first led into captivity.'
This is that Jonadab, the son of Rechab, who is written in the book of Kingdoms to have ascended the chariot with Jehu; and his sons are those who, ever dwelling in tents, were at last, because of the irruption of the Chaldean army, compelled to enter Jerusalem, and are said to have endured this first captivity, in that after the freedom of the wilderness they were shut up in the city as in a prison. Therefore I beseech you that, since you are bound by the bond of your holy sister and proceed with a step not wholly unhampered, whether here or there you flee the multitudes of men, and the duties and salutations and banquets, as certain chains, as it were, of pleasures. Let your food, both midday and evening, be herbs and pulse, and now and then account little fishes as the highest of dainties.
He who longs for Christ and feeds on that Bread does not greatly inquire what dung he may make from precious foods. Whatever is not perceived after the throat, let it be to you the same as bread and pulse. You have, against Jovinian, books that discuss more fully the contempt of the belly and the gullet. Let sacred reading ever be in your hand; you must pray frequently, and with body bent your mind must be lifted up to the Lord. Let your vigils be frequent, and you must often sleep on an empty stomach. Flee idle rumors and vainglories and fawning flatterers as enemies. Distribute with your own hand refreshment of your means to the poor and to the brethren; faith is a rare thing among men. Do you not believe that what I say is true? Consider the money-bags of Judas.
Do not with a swelling mind covet humility of dress; avoid the company of the worldly, and especially of the powerful. What need have you to see more often those very things in the contempt of which you began to be a monk? Let your sister above all decline the conversations of matrons, nor amid silken robes and the gems of the women sitting round her either grieve or marvel that she is dressed in mean attire, because the one is a repentance of one's purpose, the other a seed-plot of vainglory. Beware lest, as though a faithful and famous steward of your former self, you receive another's money to distribute. You understand what I say; for the Lord has given you understanding in all things. Have the simplicity of the dove, that you may plot deceits against no one, and the cunning of the serpent, that you may not be tripped up by the snares of others.
There is little difference in vice between a Christian being able to deceive and being deceived. Whomever you perceive to speak to you always or often about money — save for almsgiving, which lies open impartially to all — hold him rather to be a peddler than a monk. Beyond food and clothing and manifest necessities, give nothing to anyone, lest dogs eat the children's bread. But the true temple of Christ is the soul of the believer: adorn that, clothe that, offer gifts to that, receive Christ in that. What profit is there that walls should gleam with gems and Christ should die of hunger in the poor? Now the things you possess are no longer yours; a stewardship has been entrusted to you. Remember Ananias and Sapphira. They timidly kept back their own;
do you take heed lest you imprudently pour out Christ's substance — that is, lest by immoderate judgment you give the property of the poor to those who are not poor, and, according to the saying of a most prudent man, liberality perish through liberality. Do not look to the trappings and empty names of the Catos. 'I,' he says, 'have known you within and beneath the skin.' To be a Christian is a great thing, not to seem one. And somehow those things please the world more which displease Christ. This is not, as they say, teaching the sow Minerva, but as a friend I have warned a friend entering upon a beloved sea, preferring that you should seek out my capacity rather than my goodwill, so that, in that in which I have slipped, you may go forward with firm step. Your book, which you sent, composed prudently and elegantly on behalf of the emperor Theodosius, I read gladly.
And what especially pleased me in it was the subdivision; and while in the first parts you surpass others, in the last but one you surpass yourself. But the very style of eloquence too is compact and polished, and, while it shines with Ciceronian purity, it is thick with sentiments. For, as a certain man says, that oration lies low in which only the words are praised. Besides, there is a great consequence of matters, and one thing hangs upon another. Whatever you have taken up is either the end of what precedes or the beginning of what follows. Happy Theodosius, who is defended by such an orator of Christ! You have adorned his purple and consecrated the usefulness of his laws to future ages. Well done, and bravo: you who have such rudiments, what a practiced soldier you will be!
Oh, if it were permitted me to lead such a genius, not through the Aonian mountains and the peaks of Helicon, as the poets sing, but through Zion and Tabor and Sinai and the heights of the Scriptures; if it fell to my lot to teach what I have learned, and, as it were by hand, to hand on the mysteries of the prophets, there would be born to us something which learned Greece would not possess. Hear then, my fellow-servant, my friend, my brother, hearken a little while, by what path you should walk in the Holy Scriptures. All that we read in the divine books indeed shines and glitters even in the rind, but it is sweeter in the marrow. He who would eat the kernel breaks the nut. 'Reveal,' says David, 'mine eyes, and I shall consider the wondrous things of thy law.'
If so great a prophet confesses the darkness of his ignorance, by what night of unknowing do you think we little ones, and almost sucklings, are encompassed? Now this veil is placed not only on the face of Moses, but also on the evangelists and on the apostles. The Savior spoke to the crowds in parables, and, testifying that what was said was mystical, He said, 'He who has ears to hear, let him hear.' Unless all things that are written be opened by Him who has the key of David, who opens and none shuts, shuts and none opens, they will be unfolded by no other's unlocking. If you had this foundation — nay rather, if a finishing hand, as it were, were drawn over your work — we should have nothing more beautiful, nothing more learned, and nothing more Latin than your volumes.
Tertullian is full of sentiments, but difficult in his speech. The blessed Cyprian goes forward like a most pure fountain, sweet and calm, and, though he is wholly given to the exhortation of virtues, being occupied with the straits of persecution, he by no means expounded the divine Scriptures. Victorinus, crowned with a glorious martyrdom, cannot express what he understands. Lactantius, like a certain river of Ciceronian eloquence — would that he had been able to affirm our doctrines as easily as he destroyed those of others! Arnobius is uneven and excessive, and confused for want of any division of his work. The holy Hilary is raised aloft on the Gallican buskin, and, though he is adorned with the flowers of Greece, is at times entangled in long periods, and is far from the reading of the simpler brethren.
I say nothing of the rest, whether dead or still living, concerning whom on both sides others after us will judge. I will come to you yourself, my fellow-initiate, my comrade and my friend — my friend, I say, even before you were known to me — and I will pray you not to suspect flattery in intimacy; nay rather, esteem me either to err, or to slip through love, rather than to deceive a friend by adulation. You have a great genius, an infinite store of speech: you speak both easily and purely, and that very ease and purity is mingled with prudence. For, the head being sound, all the senses are vigorous.
If to this prudence and eloquence there were added either the study or the understanding of the Scriptures, I should see you in a short time holding the citadel of our men, and, ascending like Joab the roofs of Zion, singing on the housetops what you had learned in the bedchambers. Gird yourself, I beseech you, gird yourself. Life has given nothing to mortals without great labor. Let the church hold you as a noble, as the senate held you before. Prepare for yourself riches which you may daily disburse and which may never fail, while your age is in its prime, while grey hair is still but sprinkled on your head, before 'diseases and sad old age come on, and toil, and the harshness of unrelenting death snatches you away.' I am content with nothing middling in you: I desire the whole to be highest, the whole to be perfect.
With what eagerness I received the holy presbyter Vigilantius, it is better that you should learn from his own words than from my letters. As to why he set out so quickly and left us, I cannot say, lest I seem to wound anyone. Yet, as one passing by and hastening, I detained him a little while and gave him a taste of our friendship, that through him you might learn what you do not lack in us. Your holy fellow-servant, who serves in the Lord together with you, I wish to be greeted through you. LIX. TO MARCELLA, ON FIVE QUESTIONS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. You provoke me with great questions, and, while you ask, you teach my wit grown torpid with leisure.
Your first inquiry was, what are those things which 'neither eye has seen nor ear heard, nor have they entered into the heart of man, which God has prepared for those who love Him,' and how the same apostle again subjoins, 'but to us God has revealed them through His Spirit'; and, if it was revealed to the apostle, we ought to understand how he also revealed it to others. To which the answer is brief: we ought not to seek what that is which neither eye has seen nor ear heard nor has entered into the heart of man. For if it is unknown, how can it be known? What is promised in the future is not discerned in the present. For hope which is seen is not hope, but already a sure possession — just as if someone should wish to say:
'Show me what is invisible; speak what cannot be heard; expound what human thought does not comprehend!' Therefore in this sense the apostle must be believed to have spoken, that spiritual things cannot be comprehended by carnal eyes and by a carnal ear and by mortal thought. For even though we once knew Jesus according to the flesh, yet now we no longer know Him thus. And in the epistle of John it is written: 'Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be, for we shall see Him as He is.' And as for his testifying that it was revealed to himself and to the saints through the Spirit, it does not immediately follow that he himself revealed it to others. Otherwise, he heard in paradise also unspeakable words, which he could not relate to others;
or if he did relate them, they are by no means unspeakable. The second question was that in which you say you read in passing, in my little works, that the lambs which stand on the right and the kids which are on the left are Christians and Gentiles, and not rather the good and the wicked. I do not recall having ever said this; and, if I had said it, I should not be obstinate in the error. But so far as it occurs to me on the spur of dictation, I know that in the second volume against Jovinian I discussed this chapter, and not only this, but also that which falls under the same question, where the bad fishes are separated from the good fishes. What therefore was there fully treated seems now to be passed over.
The third thing you had asked about is what the apostle says: that at the coming of the Lord and Savior some who are living shall be caught up to meet Him in the clouds, so that they are not anticipated by those who have fallen asleep in Christ; and you wish to know whether they thus meet Him in their bodies and do not first die, since both our Lord Himself died, and Enoch and Elijah, according to the Apocalypse of John, are said to be destined to die — namely, that there be no one who has not tasted death.
This can be known from the very context of the passage: that the saints who at the coming of the Savior shall be found in the body, meet Him in those same bodies, yet in such wise that what is inglorious and corruptible and mortal is changed into glory and incorruption and immortality, so that, of such a kind as the bodies that shall rise again, into such a substance the bodies of the living also are transformed. Whence the apostle says in another place:
For this reason we do not wish to be unclothed, but rather to be clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life — that is, that the body should not be forsaken by the soul, but rather that, with the soul dwelling within it, that which before was inglorious might become glorious. But concerning Enoch and Elijah, whom the Apocalypse says shall come and shall also die, this is not the moment for discussion, since that whole book must either be understood spiritually, as we judge, or, if we follow a carnal interpretation, we must acquiesce in Jewish fables — that Jerusalem be rebuilt, that victims be offered in the temple, and that, with the spiritual worship diminished, the carnal ceremonies should prevail. The fourth point you asked was this: how it is that in John's Gospel, after the resurrection, it is said to Mary Magdalene:
'Touch me not, for I have not yet ascended to my Father'; and yet again in Matthew it is written that the women fell down at the Saviour's feet — since surely to touch His feet after the resurrection and not to touch them are not one and the same thing. This Mary Magdalene is the very one out of whom He had cast seven demons, so that where sin had abounded, grace might yet more abound. She, because she supposed the Lord to be the gardener and spoke to Him as though to a man, and sought the living among the dead, rightly hears: 'Touch me not.' And the meaning is: 'You do not deserve to cling to my footsteps, nor to worship me as Lord, nor to hold His feet, whom you do not believe to have risen.
For to you I have not yet ascended to my Father.' But the other women, who do touch His feet, confess Him as Lord and are counted worthy to cling to the footsteps of Him whom they trust has ascended to the Father. Yet even if the same woman is reported in different Gospels both to have held His feet and not to have held them, the solution is easy: for she might first have been rebuked as one who was unbelieving, and afterwards not repelled, as one who had exchanged her error for confession. The same may be understood also of the thieves, since one Evangelist relates that both blasphemed, while another tells that one of them made confession.
The last sheet contained this question: whether after the resurrection the Lord dwelt with His disciples for forty days and was never elsewhere, or whether He secretly ascended into heaven and descended again, and nevertheless did not deny His presence to the apostles. If you consider the God, the Son of God, of whom we speak, and that He is the very one who says, 'Do I not fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord'; and of whom another prophet testifies, 'Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool'; and again elsewhere, 'Who holds the heaven in His palm and the earth in His fist'; of whom David sings, 'Whither shall I go from thy Spirit, and whither shall I flee from thy face? If I ascend into heaven, thou art there;'
'if I descend into hell and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me' — then assuredly you will not doubt that even before the resurrection God the Word dwelt in the Lord's body in such a way that He was both in the Father and encompassed the circle of the heavens, and was in all things poured within and poured around — that is, so that as the one within He penetrated all things, and as the one without He contained them. It is therefore foolish to confine His power within the smallness of a single little body. Him whom heaven cannot contain — and yet He who was everywhere was also wholly in the Son of Man; for the divine nature and God the Word cannot be cut into parts nor divided by places, but, being everywhere, is wholly everywhere.
He was therefore, at one and the same time, both with the apostles for forty days, and with the angels, and in the Father, and in the uttermost bounds of the sea. He was present in all places: with Thomas in India, with Peter at Rome, with Paul in Illyricum, with Titus in Crete, with Andrew in Achaia, with each of the apostolic men in each and every region. But when He is said to forsake some or not to forsake them, this sets no limit to His nature, but describes rather the merits of those among whom He deigns to be. LX. TO HELIODORUS, THE EPITAPH OF NEPOTIANUS. Small talents cannot sustain great themes, and in the very attempt, having dared beyond their strength, they sink down;
and the greater the thing to be said, the more he is overwhelmed who cannot unfold the magnitude of the matter in words. My Nepotianus, yours, ours — nay rather Christ's, and, because Christ's, therefore all the more ours — has left behind old men wounded by the dart of longing for him, and has consumed them with intolerable grief. Him whom we thought our heir, we now hold only as ashes. For whom now shall my talent sweat with labour? Whom will my poor little letters be eager to please? Where is that taskmaster of ours, whose voice was sweeter to me than the night than the swan's song? My mind is stunned, my hand trembles, my eyes grow dim, my tongue stammers. Whatever I shall say — because he will not hear it — seems mute. The very pen, as though feeling it, and the wax grown somewhat sadder, is overspread with rust or mould.
As often as I strive to break forth into words and to scatter the flowers of this epitaph over his tomb, so often my eyes are filled, and, my grief renewed, I am wholly present at his funeral. There was once a custom that free-born sons should pronounce the praises of the departed over their corpses in public assembly before the rostra, and, after the manner of mournful dirges, stir the breasts of their hearers to weeping and groaning. But lo, the order of things among us is reversed, and to our calamity nature has lost her own rights: what a young man ought to have rendered to the old, this we old men render to a young man. What then shall I do? Shall I join my tears with yours? But the apostle forbids it, calling the Christian dead 'those who sleep'; and the Lord in the Gospel says, 'The maiden is not dead, but sleepeth.'
Lazarus too, because he had slept, was raised up. Should I rejoice and be glad that he was taken away, lest malice should alter his mind, because his soul was pleasing to God? Yet against my will, and though I resist, the tears flow down my cheeks, and amid the precepts of the virtues and the hope of the resurrection, the affection of longing breaks my too-credulous mind. O death, that dividest brothers, and cruel and hard dost sunder those joined in love! The Lord brought a burning wind rising up from the desert, which dried up thy veins and made desolate thy fountain. Thou didst indeed devour Jonah, but even in thy belly he lived. Thou didst carry him as one dead, that the tempest of the world might grow calm, and that our Nineveh might be saved by his preaching.
He, he it is that overcame thee, he that slew thee — that fugitive prophet, who left his own house, forsook his inheritance, gave his beloved soul into the hands of those who sought it. He who once through Hosea threatened thee sternly: 'O death, I will be thy death; O hell, I will be thy destruction' — by his death thou art dead, by his death we live. Thou didst devour, and wast thyself devoured; and while thou wast tempted by the enticement of the body He had assumed, and didst think the prey within thy greedy jaws, thine own inward parts were pierced through by the barbed tooth. Thanks be to thee, O Christ our Saviour, we thy creatures give thanks, that thou, in being slain, didst slay so mighty an adversary of ours. Who before thee was more wretched than man, who, prostrate beneath the eternal terror of death, had received the sense of living for this alone — that he might perish?
For death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression. If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were in hell, who then was in the kingdom of heaven? If thy friends were held liable under the punishment of Adam's offence, even those who had not sinned, bound by others' sins, what must we believe concerning those who said in their hearts, 'There is no God' — who became corrupt and abominable in their own desires, who turned aside and together became unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one? But if Lazarus is seen in Abraham's bosom and in a place of refreshment, what likeness is there between hell and the kingdom of heaven? Before Christ, Abraham was among those in the lower world; after Christ, the thief is in paradise.
And therefore at His resurrection many bodies of the sleeping arose and were seen in the heavenly Jerusalem. Then was that saying fulfilled: 'Awake thou that sleepest, and arise, and Christ shall give thee light.' John the Baptist cries out in the wilderness: 'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.' For from the days of John the Baptist the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. That flaming sword, the guardian of paradise, and the cherubim set at the gates, have been quenched and unbarred by the blood of Christ. Nor is it any wonder that this is promised to us at the resurrection, since all of us who live in the flesh but not according to the flesh have our citizenship in heaven, and even to us who are still set here it is said upon earth:
'The kingdom of God is within you.' Add to this, that before the resurrection of Christ God was known only in Judea; in Israel His name was great, and even those who knew Him were nevertheless dragged down to the lower world. Where then were the men of the whole world, from India to Britain, from the frozen region of the north to the shores of the Atlantic ocean — peoples so numberless, multitudes of nations so great, so varied in tongues, in the fashion of their dress, and in their arms? After the manner of fishes and locusts, and like flies and gnats, they were being worn away; for without knowledge of his Creator, every man is but a beast. But now the passion of Christ and His resurrection are sounded forth by the voices and letters of all nations.
I say nothing of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Latins, which nations the Lord consecrated to His own faith in the title upon the cross. The immortal soul, subsisting even after the dissolution of the body — which Pythagoras dreamed of, which Democritus did not believe, over which Socrates disputed in prison to console himself for his condemnation — the Indian, the Persian, the Goth, the Egyptian now hold as their philosophy. The savagery of the Bessi and the throng of skin-clad peoples, who once sacrificed men at the funeral rites of the dead, have broken their harsh shrieking into the sweet melody of the cross, and the one voice of the whole world is Christ. What do we, O my soul? Whither do we turn? What shall we take up first? What shall we pass over in silence?
The precepts of the rhetoricians have slipped from you; and, taken up with mourning, oppressed with tears, hindered by sobs, you cannot keep the ordered course of speech! Where is that study of letters from infancy, and the ever-praised saying of Anaxagoras and Telamon: 'I knew that I had begotten a mortal'? We have read Crantor, whose volume Cicero followed to comfort his own grief. We have run through the little works of Plato, Diogenes, Clitomachus, Carneades, Posidonius composed to soothe sorrows — men who in various ages strove, whether in books or in letters, to lessen the laments of diverse persons, so that even if our own talent were parched, it might be watered from their fountains.
They set before us countless men, and above all Pericles and Xenophon the Socratic; of whom the one, having lost two sons, delivered a discourse in the assembly crowned with a garland; the other, when as he was sacrificing he heard that his son had been slain in war, is said to have laid down his garland, and to have set the same upon his head again after he learned that the youth had fallen fighting bravely in the battle-line. Why should I recall the Roman generals, by whose virtues the histories of Latium shine as though with certain stars? Pulvillus, while dedicating the Capitol, when it was suddenly announced that his son had died, ordered him to be buried in his absence; Lucius Paulus entered the city in triumph within seven days, between the funerals of his two sons.