'My Father worketh until now, and I work.' He is always the Bestower and always the Giver. It does not suffice me that he once gave, unless he give always. I ask that I may receive, and when I have received, I ask again. I am greedy for receiving the benefits of God; neither does he fail in giving, nor am I satisfied in receiving. The more I drink, the more I thirst. For I have read it sung by the voice of the psalmist: 'Taste and see that the Lord is sweet.' Every good thing we have is a taste of the Lord. When I shall have thought myself to have reached the goal of the virtues, then I shall have the beginning. For the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, which is expelled and destroyed by charity. This is the sole perfection in men, if they have come to know that they are imperfect.
'And you also,' he says, 'when you shall have done all things, say: We are unprofitable servants; what we ought to have done, we have done.' If he is unprofitable who has done all things, what is to be said of him who could not fulfil them? Whence the Apostle also says that he has received in part and comprehended in part, and is not yet perfect, forgetting the things that are past and stretching himself forth to what is future. He who always forgets the things past and desires the things to come shows that he is not content with things present. But as for their tossing up and down that free will is destroyed by us, let them hear on the contrary that those destroy the freedom of choice who misuse it badly against the benefit of the Giver. Who destroys free will?
He who always renders thanks to God and, whatever flows in his own little stream, refers it to the Fountain — or he who says: 'Depart from me, for I am clean; I have no need of thee. For thou didst once give me freedom of choice, that I might do what I have willed; why dost thou again thrust thyself in, so that I can do nothing unless thou hast fulfilled thy gifts in me? Fraudulently you hold forth the grace of God, so as to refer it to the condition of man and not to require the help of God in individual works, lest, forsooth, you seem to lose free will; and, while you despise the support of God, you seek the aid of men.' Hear, I pray, hear the sacrilege:
'If,' he says, 'I wish to bend a finger, to move a hand, to sit, to stand, to walk, to run, to spit, to blow the mucus from my nostrils with two little fingers, to relieve my bowels, to pass urine — shall I always need the help of God?' Hear, ingrate — nay rather sacrilegious one — the Apostle proclaiming: 'Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever else ye do, do all in the name of the Lord'; and that word of James: 'Go to now, ye that say: Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, and will spend there a year, and will traffic and make gain — ye who know nothing of the morrow. For what is your life? Ye are but a breath, or a vapour appearing for a little while, and then vanishing away' — instead of what you ought to say:
'If the Lord will, and we shall live, we will do this or that.' But now you exult in your arrogances; all such glorying is evil. Do you think an injury is done to you and the freedom of choice destroyed, if you always have recourse to God as your author, if you hang upon his will and say: 'My eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he shall pluck my feet out of the snare'? Whence also do you dare to bring forth with rash tongue that each one is governed by his own choice? If he is governed by his own choice, where is the help of God? If he does not need Christ as his ruler, how does Jeremiah write: 'The way of man is not in himself,' and: 'By the Lord are the steps of a man directed'? You say the commandments of God are easy, and yet you can bring forth no one who has fulfilled them all. Answer me:
Are they easy or difficult? If easy, bring forth who has fulfilled them, and why David sings in the psalm: 'Thou who framest labour in a precept,' and again: 'Because of the words of thy lips I have kept hard ways,' and the Lord in the Gospel: 'Enter ye in by the narrow gate,' and: 'Love your enemies,' and: 'Pray for them that persecute you'? But if difficult, why did you dare to say that the commandments of God are easy, which no one has fulfilled? Do you not perceive that your opinions fight against one another? For either they are easy, and there is an infinite multitude of men who have fulfilled them, or they are difficult, and you have rashly said that to be easy which is difficult.
You are wont to say this too: that either the commandments are possible and rightly given by God, or they are impossible and the fault is not in those who received the commandments, but in him who gave impossible things. Did God command me to be what God is, that there should be nothing between me and the Lord my Creator, that I should be greater than the loftiness of the angels, that I should have what the angels have not? Of him it is written as of a property peculiar to himself: 'Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.' If this is common to me also with Christ, what will he have that is peculiarly his own? Otherwise your opinion is destroyed by itself. You assert that a man can be without sin if he wishes, and after a most heavy slumber, to deceive untrained souls, you vainly try to add:
'not without the grace of God.' For if a man can once by himself be without sin, what need is there of the grace of God? But if without his grace he can do nothing, what need was there to say that he can do what he cannot? 'He can,' he says, 'be without sin, he can be perfect, if he wishes.' For what Christian does not wish to be without sin, or who refuses perfection, if it suffices for him to will and there immediately follows the power, if the willing has gone before? And there is no Christian who does not wish to be without sin: all therefore will be without sin, because all desire to be free from sin.
And in this you will be held ungrateful, that you who can bring forth either no one, or only a rare person, without sin, yet confess that all are without sin. 'God gave possible commandments,' he says. And who denies this? But how this opinion is to be understood, the vessel of election most plainly teaches; for he says: 'What was impossible to the law, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, even of sin condemned sin in the flesh'; and again: 'By the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.' And lest you should think this said only of the law of Moses and not of all the commandments which are contained under the one name of 'law,' the same Apostle writes, saying: 'For I delight in the law of God according to the inner man;
but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin, which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord.' Why he said this, he shows in another passage: 'For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I work, I know not. For not what I will, this I do, but what I hate, that I do. But if I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law, that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.'
'For to will is present with me, but to work the good I find not. For the good that I will, this I do not; but the evil that I will not, this I do. But if I do that which I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.' You will cry out in protest and say that we follow the dogma of the Manichaeans and of those who, out of diverse natures, contrive wars for the Church, asserting that there is an evil nature which can in no way be changed. Impute this not to me but to the Apostle, who knew that God is one thing, man another, the frailty of the flesh one thing, the fortitude of the spirit another. For the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other, so that we do not the very things that we would.
From me you shall never hear that nature is evil; but as to how the frailty of the flesh is to be discussed, let us learn with him who wrote it as our teacher. Ask him why he said: 'For not what I will, this I do, but the evil that I hate, that I do' — what necessity impedes his will, what so great force, worthy of hatred, commands him to act, so that he is compelled to do not what he wills, but what he hates and does not will. He will answer you: 'O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?' Charge God with a stronger calumny: why, when Esau and Jacob were still in the womb, he said:
'Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.' Accuse him of iniquity: why Achar the son of Charmi stole something from the spoil of Jericho, and so many thousands of men were slaughtered for his sin; wherefore the sons of Eli sinned and nearly the whole people was destroyed and the ark was captured; David sinned in numbering the people, and why in all Israel so many thousands of men were slain; and, last of all — the very thing your comrade Porphyry is wont to cast at us — by what reasoning God, being clement and merciful, from Adam even until Moses and from Moses until the coming of Christ, allowed all the nations to perish in ignorance of the law and of the commandments of God.
For neither the Britons, that province fertile in tyrants, nor the nations of Scythia, nor all the barbarous peoples round about as far as the ocean, had known Moses and the prophets. What need was there for him to come in the last time, and not before an innumerable multitude of men had perished? This question the blessed Apostle, writing to the Romans, most prudently sifts. You are ignorant of these things and concede them to the knowledge of God; deign also to be ignorant of these things which you ask. Concede to God his own power; he by no means needs you as a defender. I am a wretched creature, who await your insults, who always read that saying: 'By grace ye are saved,' and:
'Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered.' To speak of my own frailty: I know that I will many things which are holy, and yet cannot fulfil them — for the fortitude of the spirit leads to life, but the frailty of the flesh leads back to death — and I hear the Lord admonishing: 'Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.' In vain do you blaspheme and thrust into the ears of the ignorant that we condemn free will. Let him be condemned who condemns it.
For the rest, we differ from the brute animals in this, that we were created of free choice; but that same free choice, as we have said, leans upon the help of God and needs his aid in each single thing — which you refuse, holding that he who once has free choice needs not God as a helper. Free choice gives free will, and does not at once make out of free choice a god who needs no one's resources. You yourself, who boast of a perfect righteousness in men equal to God, and confess that you are a sinner, answer me: do you wish, or not, to be free from sin? If you wish it, why, according to your own opinion, do you not fulfil what you desire? But if you do not wish it, you show yourself a despiser of the precepts of God. If you are a despiser, then surely you are also a sinner.
If a sinner, hear the Scripture speaking to you: 'But unto the sinner God hath said, Why dost thou declare my statutes and take my covenant in thy mouth? But thou hast hated discipline and hast cast my words behind thee.' While you will not do the words of God, you cast them behind your back, and as a new apostle you decree to the world what is to be done and not to be done. But it is not as you say; something else turns in your mind. For when you call yourself a sinner and say that a man can be without sin if he wishes, you mean this to be understood — that you indeed are holy and free from all sin, but out of humility assume the name of sinner, so that you may rather praise others and detract from yourself. That argument of yours, too — who could bear it? You say in these words:
'It is one thing to be, another to be able to be.' To be is not placed in our power; but to be able to be is said generally, namely that, although another has not been such, yet he could be who has willed to be. I ask, what is that argumentation: that there can be what never was, that there can come to be what you testify none to have brought about, to attribute it to anyone whatever, of whom you know not whether he is to be, and to give to I know not whom what you cannot prove to have been in the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles? Hear the ecclesiastical simplicity, or rusticity, or unskilfulness, as it seems to you. Speak what you believe; publicly preach what you privately speak to your disciples. You who say you have freedom of choice, why do you not freely speak what you think?
The secrets of your bedchambers hear one thing, the people of our churches another. For the unlearned crowd cannot sustain the burdens of your secret teachings, nor take solid food, which is content with the milk of infancy. I have not yet written, and already you threaten me with the thunderbolts of your rescripts, so that, forsooth, terrified by this fear, I may not dare to open my mouth; and you do not consider that we write for this very reason, that you may be compelled to answer and at some point to say openly what, according to the time, the persons, and the places, you either speak or keep silent. I do not wish it to be free for you to deny what you have once written. It is the victory of the Church that you should say openly what you think.
For either you will answer the same thing that we also say, and you will by no means be adversaries but friends; or, if you say things contrary to our dogma, in this we shall conquer, that all the churches will know what you think. To have betrayed your opinions is to have overcome them. The blasphemy is plain at first sight. That has no need to be refuted which by its very profession is at once blasphemous. You threaten us with a response which no one can avoid, except him who writes nothing at all. Whence do you know what we are going to say, that you may prepare a response? Perhaps we shall say your own things, and you sharpen the pen of your wit in vain. The Eunomians, Arians, and Macedonians, separated by their names but concordant in impiety, cause us no labour; for they speak what they think.
This is the only heresy that blushes to say in public what it is not afraid to teach in secret. The frenzy of the disciples proclaims what the masters keep silent. What they have heard in their bedchambers they preach upon the housetops, so that, if what they have said pleases their hearers, it may be credited to the glory of the masters; but if it displeases, the fault is the disciple's and not the master's. Thus your heresy has grown, and you have deceived very many, and above all those who cleave to women and believe that they cannot sin, because you are forever teaching and forever denying; and you deserve to hear that prophetic word: 'Give them, O Lord, glory in their childbearings and their travailings. What wilt thou give them? A barren womb and dry breasts.' My spirit boils; I cannot restrain my words.
The narrow limits of a letter do not admit the vastness of a lengthy work. In this little treatise no one's name is expressly touched; I have spoken against the master of a perverse doctrine. Whoever is angered and writes back will betray himself by his own testimony, like a mouse, and in a true contest will incur still greater wounds. Many years now, from my youth up to this present age, I have written various little works, and I have always made it my study to speak to my hearers what I had learned publicly in the Church, not to follow the arguments of the philosophers but to rest content with the simplicity of the apostles, knowing that it is written: 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent I will reject,' and: 'the foolishness of God is wiser than men.'
Since these things are so, I challenge my adversaries to examine all my former pages, and if they find any fault in my slender talent, to bring it into the open. For either the writings will be sound, and I shall refute their calumny, or they will be blameworthy, and I shall confess my error, preferring to correct it rather than to persist in the perversity of an opinion. And you too, therefore, distinguished doctor, either defend what you have said and buttress the subtleties of your opinions with a subsequent discourse, lest whenever it suits you, you deny what you have said; or, if indeed you have erred as a man, freely confess it, and restore concord among those who are at variance. Let it come to your mind that the Saviour's tunic was not even torn apart by the soldiers.
You behold the brethren quarrelling among themselves, and you laugh and rejoice that some are called by your name, others by Christ's. Imitate Jonah, and say: 'If this tempest is on my account, take me and cast me into the sea.' He was cast down into the deep in humility, that he might rise again more gloriously as a type of the Lord; you are lifted up to the stars in pride, that Jesus may say of you: 'I beheld Satan falling from heaven like lightning.'
But as for the fact that in the Holy Scriptures certain men are called righteous—such as Zechariah and Elizabeth, Job, Jehoshaphat and Josiah, and many whose names the sacred Scripture is woven with—although I intend to speak of this more fully in the promised work, if the Lord grants grace, yet for the present let it suffice to have touched briefly upon this: that they are called righteous, not because they are free from every fault, but on account of the greater part of their virtues. In short, Zechariah is condemned by silence, and Job is rebuked by his own speech, and Jehoshaphat and Josiah, who are without doubt written down as righteous, are recorded to have done things that displeased the Lord.
Of these, the one gave aid to an ungodly man and was reproved by a prophet; the other, contrary to the Lord's command, went out from the mouth of Jeremiah to meet Necho, the king of Egypt, and was slain; and yet each is called righteous. Of the rest it is not the time to write; for you have demanded of me not a book but a letter, one which must be dictated at leisure, and all their objections must be overthrown by the aid of Christ—which we must establish by the testimonies of the Holy Scriptures, in which God daily speaks to those who believe.
And through you I beseech and admonish the assembly of that holy and illustrious house, that they may not, on account of one or—at most—three petty fellows, take upon themselves the dregs of such great heresies, or—to say the least—the infamy of them, so that where formerly virtue and holiness were praised, there now the foulness of diabolical presumption and of a most filthy fellowship should dwell. And let those who supply resources to men of this sort know that they are gathering together a multitude of heretics, and making enemies of Christ, and nourishing His adversaries, and in vain pretending one thing with the tongue when they are proved to feel another with the hand. 134. TO AUGUSTINE. To the truly holy lord, venerable to me with all affection, Pope Augustine, Jerome sends greeting in Christ.
The honourable man, my brother, the son of your dignity, the presbyter Orosius, I received both on his own merit and at your bidding. But there fell out a most difficult time, when it was better for me to keep silent than to speak, so that our studies ceased and, as with Appius, a currish eloquence was practised. And so to your two little books, which you dedicated to my name, most learned and shining with all the splendour of eloquence, I could not for the time reply—not that I think there is anything in them to be censured, but because, according to the blessed Apostle, 'let each abound in his own sense, one indeed thus, another thus.' Certainly whatever could be said and drawn by a lofty genius from the fountains of the Holy Scriptures has been set forth and discussed by you.
But I entreat your reverence to bear with me a little while I praise your genius; for we are discoursing between ourselves for the sake of learning. As for the rest, rivals, and especially the heretics, if they see differing opinions between us, will calumniously say that they proceed from rancour of soul. But for my part it is my resolve to love you, to receive you, to reverence you, to admire you, and to defend your words as though they were my own—indeed, even in the dialogue which I lately published, I made mention of your blessedness, as was fitting—and rather let us give our effort to this, that the most pernicious heresy may be removed from the churches, which ever feigns repentance so that it may have the power of teaching in the churches, lest, if it betray itself in open light, being cast out of doors, it should die.
Your holy and venerable daughters Eustochium and Paula walk worthily both according to their birth and according to your exhortation, and they especially salute your blessedness, as does also all the brotherhood which strives together with us to serve the Lord and Saviour. Last year, on account of their affair, we sent the holy presbyter Firmus to Ravenna and thence to Africa and Sicily, and we suppose that he is now staying in the parts of Africa. I pray that you would salute, as a service done to me, the holy men who cleave to your side. I have also directed my letters to the holy presbyter Firmus, which, if they should come to you, be not loath to forward to him. May Christ the Lord keep you safe and mindful of me, truly holy and most blessed lord and pope.
We suffer in this province a great scarcity of copyists of the Latin tongue. 135. THE LETTER OF POPE INNOCENT TO AURELIUS. To his most beloved brother Aurelius, Innocent. Our fellow-presbyter Jerome rightly believed that a most devout journey of coming to us befitted your affections. We have compassion on a member of our flock, and what we judged ought to be done, or were able to do, we have swiftly carried out. Let your brotherhood, dearest brother, hasten to render letters to the aforesaid man the more quickly. 136. THE LETTER OF INNOCENT TO JEROME. To his most beloved son Jerome the presbyter, Innocent. The Apostle testifies that contention has never done any good in the Church, and therefore he bids that the correction of heretics be done at the first, rather than be drawn out in a lengthy discussion.
And while this rule is regarded negligently, the evil that ought to be guarded against is not avoided but increased. Yet, since your grief and lamentation so shake our inmost being that there is no time for deliberating and taking counsel, I first address the faith of your constancy. That anyone should be stricken for the truth's sake by injury or, as you say, by danger, because he awaits blessedness—this you have often related to many, and we remind you that you are well mindful of your own preachings. Likewise, roused by so great a spectacle of evils, we hastened to take up the authority of the Apostolic See to suppress every wickedness; but as to him against whom we should rise up, we have read neither any called by name nor charged by any reasoned accusation. What, then, we are able, we suffer with you.
But if you shall lay down an open and manifest accusation against certain men, I will either appoint competent judges, or, if anything more urgent and more anxious can be done by us, I will not delay, most beloved son. Nevertheless I have written to my brother, Bishop John, that he should act more circumspectly, lest anything of such a kind be done concerning the church entrusted to him—the very kind of thing which it would be most troublesome for him himself afterwards not to have foreseen and warded off, that it might not happen. 137. THE LETTER OF INNOCENT TO JOHN. To his most beloved brother John, Innocent. The most noble and holy virgins Eustochium and Paula have bewailed that plunderings, slaughters, burnings, and every crime of the utmost madness have been perpetrated by the devil in the places of their church;
for they have kept silent the name and the case of the man. And although it be not doubtful by whom it was committed, yet it behoved your brotherhood to provide more carefully for the safeguarding of that flock, lest anything of this kind should arise which, with peril to others, assails your negligence. Meanwhile we have heard that the Lord's flock, and such lambs, laid bare by fire, arms, and persecutions, feeble after the slaughters and deaths of their own, scarcely live: does nothing move that piety of your priesthood, at so great a power of the devil admitted against you and against your own? Against you, I say; for indeed so great a wickedness having been accomplished in the church utterly condemns the gravity of the priest. Where were your provisions?
Where, surely, if any misfortunes had befallen, were your aids or consolations, since they say they still fear more than they complain to have suffered? I should judge it more deeply, if they had conferred with me somewhat more openly about this matter. See, brother, the snares of the ancient enemy, and by the spirit of a good ruler keep watch, that these things—which have been brought to us as manifest by report rather than by accusation—may either be corrected or beaten back, lest ecclesiastical law compel him who has not defended to answer for cases arising out of things fallen into ruin. 138. TO RIPARIUS. To the truly holy lord, venerable to me with all affection, Riparius, Jerome sends greeting in Christ.
From your letter and from the report of many I have learned that you are waging Christ's wars against the enemies of the catholic faith, and that the winds are contrary, and that those who ought to be defenders of the age are abettors of destruction unto mutual ruin. Yet know that into this province Catiline has been driven by no human aids but properly by the sentence of Christ, not only out of the city but also out of the borders of Palestine, and that we grieve most exceedingly that many partners of the conspiracy remained with Lentulus, who linger at Joppa.
But to us it seemed better to change our place than to lose the truth of the faith, and to relinquish the pleasantness of our buildings and dwelling rather than to be defiled by fellowship with those men, to whom for the present we had either to yield, or else to contend daily not with the tongue but with swords. And how much we have suffered, and how the exalted hand of Christ has raged for us against the enemy, I think you have learned by the frequent report of all. I beg you therefore, that you would fulfil the work you have taken up, and would not suffer Christ's Church to be without a defender while you are present. Let each one surely know that even what is within your power suffices for your share, since we must contend not with the strength of the body but with the love of the soul, which can never be overcome.
The holy brethren who are here with our littleness salute you greatly. And I suppose that the holy brother Alentius the deacon relates all things faithfully to your dignity. May Christ, our Lord almighty, keep you safe and mindful of me, truly holy and welcome brother. 139. TO APRONIUS. I know not by what temptation of the devil it has come about that your labour, and the diligence of the holy presbyter Innocent, and our desire seem at present to have no effect whatsoever. Thanks be to God that I have found you safe and fervent with the warmth of faith amid the very temptations of the devil. This is my joy, when in Christ I hear of my sons doing battle;