It is not easy to believe a charge against a man of full age, whom both his past life defends and the title of his dignity honors; but, because we are men, and at times, contrary to the maturity of our years, we slip into the vices of children—if you wish me, when I offend, to be corrected, rebuke me openly; only do not bite me in secret. 'The righteous shall correct me in mercy and reprove me; but let not the oil of the sinner anoint my head.' For 'whom the Lord loves, He corrects, and He scourges every son whom He receives.' And through Isaiah God cries out: 'My people—those who call you blessed deceive you and overturn the paths of your feet.'
For what does it profit me if you report my evils to others, if—without my knowing—you wound another by my sins, nay rather by your disparagings, and, when you tell them competitively to all, you speak to each as though you had told no other? This is not to amend me, but to satisfy your own vice. The Lord commanded that those who sin against us should be rebuked in secret, or with a witness present; and if they will not listen, that they be reported to the Church; and that those who are stubborn in evil be held as heathens and publicans.
These things I speak more plainly, that I may free my young man from the itch of both tongue and ears, that I may present him, reborn in Christ, without wrinkle and stain like a chaste virgin, and holy in mind as well as in body; lest he glory in name alone and, his lamp gone out for want of the oil of good works, be shut out from the Bridegroom. You have there the holy and most learned bishop Proculus, who with living and present voice may surpass these little scraps of ours, and by his daily discourses may direct your way, and not suffer you, by turning aside to the other side, to leave the royal road—by which Israel, hastening to the land of promise, promises that it will pass through. And would that the voice of the Church might be heard, lamenting together: 'Lord, give us peace, for you have rendered all things to us.'
Would that our renouncing of the world were of the will, not of necessity, and that our poverty had the glory of being sought after, not the torment of being imposed. Yet, amid the miseries of this present time and the swords everywhere raging, rich enough is he who needs no bread, too powerful is he who is not compelled to serve. The holy Exuperius, bishop of Toulouse, an imitator of the widow of Zarephath, though hungry himself, feeds others, and with a face pale from fasting is tormented by another's hunger, and has expended all his substance upon the bowels of Christ.
Nothing is richer than that man, who carries the Lord's body in a wicker basket, His blood in glass; who has cast avarice out of the temple; who, even without a scourge and without rebuking those who sell doves—that is, the gifts of the Holy Spirit—has overturned the tables of Mammon and scattered the coins of the money-changers, that the house of God might be called a house of prayer and not a den of thieves. Follow closely the footsteps of this man, and of the others who are like him in virtues—men whom the priesthood makes both humbler and poorer; or, if you desire perfection, go forth with Abraham from your country and from your kindred, and proceed whither you know not. If you have substance, sell it and give to the poor; if you have none, you are freed from a great burden: naked, follow the naked Christ.
Hard, great, difficult—but great are the rewards. 126. TO MARCELLINUS AND ANAPSYCHIA. To his lords truly holy and to be venerated with all the love of dutiful service, his children Marcellinus and Anapsychia, Jerome sends greeting in Christ. At last I have received from Africa the letter of your concord, and I do not repent of the boldness with which, while you kept silence, I frequently pressed my letters upon you, that I might earn a reply and might learn that you were safe—not from others reporting it, but chiefly from your own words.
Concerning the state of the soul, I remember your little question—nay, the greatest of ecclesiastical questions: whether the soul has fallen from heaven, as the philosopher Pythagoras and all the Platonists and Origen suppose; or is an effluence of God's substance, as the Stoics, Manichaeus, and the Spanish heresy of Priscillian suspect; or whether souls are kept, once created long ago, in a treasury of God, as certain churchmen trust in foolish persuasion; or whether they are made daily by God and sent into bodies, according to that which is written in the Gospel:
'My Father works until now, and I work'; or else by traduction, as Tertullian, Apollinaris, and the greatest part of the Westerners assert—that, as body is born from body, so soul is born from soul and subsists in a condition like that of the brute beasts. What my own view on this was, I know that I wrote long ago in my little works against Rufinus, against that pamphlet which he addressed to Anastasius of holy memory, bishop of the Roman church, in which, by a slippery and crafty—nay, foolish—confession, while he strives to delude the simplicity of his hearers, he made a mockery of his own faith, or rather of his faithlessness. Those books I think your holy father Oceanus has. For long ago Rufinus's books were published, and mine rebutting his calumnies against us.
Certainly you have there the holy and learned man, bishop Augustine, who will be able to teach you by living voice, as they say, and to expound his own view—nay, through himself, ours. I long ago wished to take up the volume of Ezekiel and to render to eager readers the pledge I had so often made; but at the very outset of my dictation my mind was so confounded by the devastation of the western provinces, and above all of the city of Rome, that, as the common proverb has it, I did not even know my own name; and for a long time I kept silent, knowing that it was a time of tears. But this year, when I had finished three books, the sudden onset of the barbarians—of whom your Virgil says: 'and the Barcaeans ranging far and wide,' and holy Scripture says of Ishmael:
'He shall dwell over against the face of all his brethren'—so he ran along the frontier of Egypt, of Palestine, of Phoenicia, of Syria, in the likeness of a torrent, dragging all things with it, so that scarcely, by the mercy of Christ, were we able to escape their hands. But if, according to the renowned orator, the laws are silent amid arms, how much more the studies of the Scriptures, which need both a multitude of books and silence, and the diligence of copyists, and—what is especially their own—the security and leisure of those who dictate! And so I have sent two books to my holy daughter Fabiola, copies of which, if you wish, you may borrow from her; for, owing to the straits of the time, I could not have others transcribed. When you have read them and seen the entrance-halls, it will be an easy conjecture what the house itself is to be.
But I trust in the mercy of God, who helped us in the most difficult beginning of the aforesaid work, that He Himself will help us also in the almost final parts of the prophet, in which the wars of Gog and Magog are told, and in the very last, in which the building, the variety, and the measure of the most sacred and inexplicable temple are described. Our holy brother Oceanus, to whom you desire to be commended, is so great and such a man, and so learned in the law of the Lord, that even without our asking he can instruct you and expound our view upon all questions of the Scriptures, according to the measure of our common ability. May Christ our almighty God keep you safe and flourishing in a long life, my lords truly holy. 127.
TO THE VIRGIN PRINCIPIA, ON THE LIFE OF SAINT MARCELLA. Often and much you demand, Principia, virgin of Christ, that I recall in writing the memory of the holy woman Marcella, and that I describe the good which we long enjoyed, so that it may be known and imitated by others as well. And I grieve enough that you urge one who runs of his own accord, and think that I need entreaties—I who would not yield even to you in love of her, and who receive far more benefit than I bestow by the remembrance of such great virtues. For that until now I have kept silent and let two years pass by in silence was not, as you wrongly judge, out of dissimulation, but out of an incredible sorrow, which so oppressed my mind that I judged it better for the present to be silent than to say nothing worthy of her praises.
Nor indeed will I extol your Marcella—nay, mine, and, to speak more truly, ours, the renowned glory of all the saints and especially of the city of Rome—by the arts of rhetoricians, so as to set forth her illustrious family, the glory of high blood, and the pedigrees running down through consuls and praetorian prefects. I will praise in her nothing but what is her own, and in this the nobler, that, despising wealth and nobility, she made herself the nobler by poverty and humility. Bereaved by her father's death, she was deprived also of her husband, in the seventh month after her marriage.
And when Cerealis, whose name is illustrious among the consuls, sought her hand rather ambitiously on account of her youth, the antiquity of her family, and her signal beauty of body—which is wont most of all to please men—and temperance of character, and, being aged, promised her his riches and wished to transfer his gift to her not as to a wife but as to a daughter, and when her mother Albina of her own accord longed for so illustrious a safeguard for her widowed house, she answered: 'If I wished to marry, and did not desire to dedicate myself to perpetual chastity, I would assuredly seek a husband, not an inheritance.' And when he urged that old men too can live long and young men die quickly, she elegantly jested: 'A young man indeed can die quickly, but an old man cannot live long.'
Rejected by this saying, he became an example to the rest, that they might despair of marriage with her. We read in the Gospel according to Luke: 'And there was Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher; and she was of a great age, having lived with a husband seven years from her virginity; and she was a widow of about eighty-four years, who departed not from the temple, serving with fastings and prayers night and day.' And no wonder if she was found worthy to see the Savior, whom she sought with so great labor. Let us compare the seven years with the seven months—to hope for Christ and to hold Him, to confess Him born and to believe in Him crucified, not to deny the little child and to rejoice in the Man who reigns:
I make no distinction among holy women—as some are wont foolishly to do among holy men and princes of the churches—but my assertion tends to this: that they whose labor is one may have also one reward. It is difficult, in a slanderous city and in a metropolis which was once the populace of the world and the palm of vices—where men used to disparage the honorable and stain the pure and clean—not to draw upon oneself some tale of sinister rumor. Whence the prophet wishes for, rather than presumes upon, a thing most difficult and almost impossible, saying: 'Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord'—calling those undefiled in the way of this world whom no breath of obscene rumor has stained, who have brought no reproach against their neighbors.
Of whom the Savior also says in the Gospel: 'Be,' He says, 'well-disposed'—or well-minded—'toward your adversary while you are with him in the way.' Who ever heard anything displeasing about this woman, so as to believe it? Who believed it, without rather condemning himself of malice and infamy? By her, first of all, the heathen world was put to confusion, when it became plain to all what Christian widowhood was, which she promised both by her conscience and by her habit.
For those women are wont to paint their faces with rouge and white lead, to gleam in silken garments, to glitter with jewels, to carry gold upon their necks, and from their pierced ears to hang the most precious pearls of the Red Sea, and to reek of musk — so that at last they may rejoice to have been rid of the dominion of husbands, and may seek out other men, not those whom they might serve according to God's ordinance, but those over whom they might rule. To this end they even choose poor men, so that these may seem to bear only the name of husbands, men who patiently endure rivals; and if they so much as murmur, they are cast out at once. Our widow used such garments as would keep out the cold, not lay bare her limbs; she rejected gold down to the very signet of a ring, storing it up rather in the bellies of the poor than in money-bags.
Never was she without her mother; never did she see any of the clergy or monks — as the needs of a large household at times required — without witnesses present. Always in her company she kept virgins and widows, and grave women too, knowing that from the wantonness of maidservants the character of their mistresses is often judged, and that each takes delight in the fellowship of such as she herself is. Her ardor for the divine Scriptures was incredible, and she was ever singing: «In my heart have I hidden thy words, that I might not sin against thee,» and that verse concerning the perfect man: «and his will is in the law of the Lord, and in his law will he meditate day and night» — meditating on the law not by repeating what is written, as the Pharisees among the Jews suppose, but by understanding it in deed, according to that apostolic saying:
«Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of the Lord»; and the words of the prophet who says: «By thy commandments have I gained understanding» — meaning that only after he had fulfilled the commandments did he know himself worthy to attain the understanding of the Scriptures. This too we read elsewhere: «Jesus began to do and to teach.» For however illustrious a doctrine may be, it blushes when a man's own conscience reproves it; and in vain does his tongue preach poverty and teach almsgiving, if he swells with the riches of Croesus, and, though covered with a cheap little cloak, does battle against the moths of his silken robes. Her fasts were moderate, her abstinence from flesh, and rather the smell than the taste of wine, on account of her stomach and frequent infirmities.
Rarely did she go out in public, and above all she avoided the houses of noble matrons, lest she be forced to see what she had despised. She frequented the basilicas of the apostles and martyrs in secret prayers, and shunned the throngs of the people. She was obedient to her mother to such a degree that at times she did what she did not wish. For when her mother, loving her own blood and wishing, in default of sons and grandsons, to bestow all upon her brother's children, this daughter would have chosen the poor; yet she could not oppose her mother, and yielded her necklaces and whatever furnishings there were to the rich, to perish with them, preferring rather to lose money than to grieve her parent's heart.
At that time no noble woman at Rome had known of the monastic profession, nor dared, on account of the novelty of the thing, to assume a name that was then held disgraceful and mean among the people. It was from the priests of Alexandria, and from Pope Athanasius, and afterwards from Peter — who, fleeing the persecution of the Arian heresy, had taken refuge at Rome as at the safest haven of their communion — that she learned of the life of the blessed Antony, then still living, and of the monasteries of Pachomius in the Thebaid, and of the discipline of virgins and widows; nor did she blush to profess what she had recognized to be pleasing to Christ. Many years afterwards Sophronia and others imitated her, to whom that saying of Ennius may most fitly be applied: «Would that in the grove of Pelion...»
Of her friendship the venerable Paula had the benefit, and in her chamber was Eustochium, the glory of virginity, nurtured — so that it is easy to judge what the mistress was, where the pupils were such. Perhaps the unbelieving reader may laugh at me for lingering over the praises of little women; but he, if he would recall the holy women, companions of the Lord and Saviour, who ministered to him of their substance, and the three Marys standing before the cross, and Mary Magdalene in particular, who because of her diligence and the ardor of her faith received the name «tower-crowned» and merited to see the risen Christ before the apostles — he will condemn himself of pride rather than us of folly, we who judge virtues not by sex but by soul.
Hence it was that Jesus loved John the Evangelist most, who, because of the nobility of his family, was known to the high priest and did not fear the plots of the Jews, so much so that he brought Peter into the courtyard, and alone of the apostles stood before the cross, and received the Saviour's mother into his own — that the virgin son might receive the virgin mother as the inheritance of the virgin Lord. For very many years, then, she so passed her life that she perceived herself an old woman before she remembered having been a young girl, praising that saying of Plato, who declared philosophy to be the contemplation of death. Hence our Apostle too: «I die daily, by your salvation»; and the Lord, according to the ancient copies:
«Unless a man takes up his cross daily and follows me, he cannot be my disciple»; and long before, through the prophet, the Holy Spirit: «For thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter»; and after many ages that sentence: «Remember always the day of death, and thou shalt never sin»; and most eloquently the precept of the satirist: «Live mindful of death; the hour flees; this word that I speak is even now gone by.» So then — as we had begun to say — she led her life and lived in such a way that she ever believed herself about to die. So did she clothe herself as to be mindful of the sepulcher, offering a reasonable sacrifice, living, pleasing to God.
At length, when ecclesiastical necessity had drawn me to Rome together with the holy bishops Paulinus and Epiphanius — of whom the one ruled the church of Antioch in Syria, the other that of Salamis in Cyprus — and when I, out of modesty, would avert my eyes from noble women, she conducted herself, according to the Apostle, «in season and out of season,» so that by her diligence she overcame my bashfulness. And because I was then reckoned to be of some name in the study of the Scriptures, never did she meet me but she would ask something about the Scriptures; nor was she at once content, but would raise questions on the contrary side, not that she might contend, but that by inquiring she might learn the solutions to those objections which she perceived could be raised.
What virtue, what genius, what holiness, what purity I found in her, I fear to tell, lest I exceed the bounds of belief, and inflict upon you a greater grief as you recall how great a good you have lost. This only will I say: that whatever was gathered in me by long study and, as it were, turned into nature by daily meditation — this she tasted, this she learned and possessed, so that after my departure, if any dispute arose over some testimony of the Scriptures, it was to her as judge that men resorted.
And because she was exceedingly prudent and knew that which the philosophers call «to prepon,» that is, «what befits what you do,» when questioned she so replied that she would call even her own answers not her own, but either mine or someone else's, so that even in what she taught she confessed herself a pupil — for she knew that it was said by the Apostle, «I permit not a woman to teach» — lest she should seem to do an injury to the male sex, and sometimes to priests inquiring about obscure and ambiguous matters.
Into our place we immediately heard that you had attached yourself to her fellowship, and that you never withdrew from her even a nail's breadth, as the saying goes, using the same house, the same chamber, the one couch, so that it became known to all in that most illustrious city that you had found a mother, and she a daughter. A suburban field served you for a monastery, and a rural spot was chosen for its solitude. And for a long while you so lived that, by imitation of you and by the converse of many, we rejoiced that Rome had been made Jerusalem. Frequent were the convents of virgins, innumerable the multitude of monks, so that from the throng of those serving God, what had before been for disgrace was afterward for glory.
Meanwhile we consoled the absence of one another by mutual discourse, and what we could not render in the flesh we rendered in the spirit. Always our letters met each other, outdid each other in courtesies, forestalled each other in greetings. She lost little who was joined to herself by continual letters. In this tranquillity and service of the Lord, a heretical tempest, arising in these provinces, threw everything into confusion, and was roused to such madness that it spared neither itself nor any of the good. And as if it were too little to have stirred up all things here, it brought a ship full of blasphemies into the Roman harbor, and the lid at once found its matching pot; and their muddy footsteps befouled the purest fountain of the Roman faith with filth.
Nor is it any wonder if in the streets and in the market of wares a painted soothsayer smites the buttocks of fools and, with twisted cudgel, breaks the teeth of those who snarl at him, when a poisonous and filthy doctrine found at Rome those whom it might lead astray. Then was that infamous translation of the books «On First Principles»; then a disciple truly worthy of his name «happy,» had he not stumbled upon such a master; then the contradiction of our own «two-tongued» ones, and the troubled school of the Pharisees.
Then holy Marcella, who had long kept silent, lest she be thought to act out of rivalry, after she perceived that the faith praised by the apostolic mouth was in many being violated — so much so that the heretic was drawing even priests and some monks, and especially men of the world, into agreement with him, and was making sport of the simplicity of the bishop, who judged others by his own disposition — resisted publicly, choosing rather to please God than men. In the Gospel the Saviour praises the steward of iniquity, because, though against his master, yet for himself he acted prudently.
The heretics, seeing that from a small spark the greatest conflagrations were being stirred up, and that the flame long since laid beneath had already reached the rooftops and could no longer be hidden, since it had deceived many, sought and obtained ecclesiastical letters, so that in communion they might seem to depart from the church. Not much time intervened; there succeeds to the pontificate a distinguished man, Anastasius, whom Rome did not deserve to keep for long, lest the head of the world be beheaded under such a bishop; nay rather, for this reason was he caught away and translated, lest he should try by his prayers to bend a sentence once passed, the Lord saying to Jeremiah:
«Pray not for this people, neither make intercession for them for good; for if they fast, I will not hear their prayers, and if they offer holocausts and victims, I will not accept them; for I will consume them by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence.» You may say: «To what end this?» To the praise of Marcella. This was the beginning of the condemnation of the heretics: while she brings forward witnesses who had first been instructed by them and afterwards had been corrected from their heretical error; while she shows the multitude of the deceived; while she thrusts forward the impious volumes «On First Principles,» which, when corrected by the hand of a scorpion, are exhibited; while the heretics, summoned by frequent letters to defend themselves, did not dare to come, and so great was the force of conscience that they preferred to be condemned in absence rather than convicted in presence.
The origin of this so glorious a victory is Marcella, and you are the head and the cause of these good things — you who know that I tell the truth, who know that I say scarcely a few things out of many, lest a hateful repetition breed weariness in the reader, and lest I seem, among the malevolent, to be venting my spleen under the occasion of another's praise. I will pass on to the rest. From the parts of the West a whirlwind, passing over to the East, threatened very many with great shipwrecks. Then was fulfilled the word: «Thinkest thou that the Son of Man, when he comes, will find faith upon the earth?»
The charity of many having grown cold, the few who loved the truth of the faith were joined to our side; their heads were publicly demanded, and against them all resources were being prepared, so that even Barnabas was drawn into that pretense — nay, into open parricide, which he committed not by strength but by will. But behold, the whole tempest was destroyed at the Lord's breath, and the prophet's prediction was fulfilled: «Thou shalt take away their spirit, and they shall fail and return to their dust. In that day shall perish all their thoughts»; and that Gospel word: «Fool, this night thy soul is required of thee; and the things which thou hast prepared, whose shall they be?»
While these things are being enacted in Jebus, a terrible rumor is brought from the West: that Rome was besieged, that the safety of the citizens was being redeemed with gold, and that when despoiled they were again surrounded, so that after their substance they might lose their life also. My voice sticks fast, and sobs interrupt the words as I dictate. The City is taken, which had taken the whole world; nay, it perishes by famine before the sword, and scarcely a few were found to be captured. To unspeakable foods the fury of the starving broke out, and they tore each other's limbs, while a mother spared not her nursing infant, and received again into her womb one whom a little before she had brought forth. «Their bodies fell like water round about Jerusalem, and there was none to bury them.» Who could unfold in words the disaster of that night, who the deaths — who could equal the sorrow with tears?
«The ancient city falls, that ruled for many years; and everywhere throughout the streets lie strewn unburied bodies without number, and through the houses many an image of death.» While meanwhile, as amid so great a confusion of affairs, the bloodstained victor enters also the house of Marcella — let it be lawful for me to speak what I have heard, nay, to relate what was seen by holy men who were present, who were there, who say that you too were joined with her even in the peril — with undaunted countenance she is said to have received those who broke in; and when gold was demanded of her and buried treasures, she pleaded her cheap tunic as excuse, yet did not gain credence for her voluntary poverty.
They say that, beaten with cudgels and scourges, she felt not the torments, but with tears, prostrate at their feet, she pleaded this — that they should not separate you from her fellowship, that youth should not have to endure what old age could not fear. Christ softened their hard hearts, and amid the bloody swords pity found a place. And when the barbarians had led both her and you to the basilica of the blessed Apostle Paul, that they might either show you safety or a sepulcher, she is said to have broken into such joy that she gave thanks to God because he had preserved you unharmed for her, because captivity had not made her poor but had found her so, because she lacked her daily bread, because, sated with Christ, she felt no hunger, because both in word and in deed she could say:
«Naked came I forth from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. As it seemed good to the Lord, so also has it been done. Blessed be the name of the Lord.» After some months, sound, whole, and with a vigorous little body, she fell asleep in the Lord, and left you the heir of her poverty — nay, through you, the poor as heirs — closing her eyes in your hands, rendering up her spirit amid your kisses, while amid your tears she smiled with the consciousness of a good life and of the rewards to come. These things, venerable Marcella, and these things to you, my daughter Principia, I have dictated in one brief nightly vigil, not with elegance of eloquence but out of the will of a mind most grateful to you, desiring to please both God and my readers. TO PACATULA.