These men, after the likeness of monstrous beasts, did not rule those handed over to them but devoured them, and fed not merely on the spoils of men, as most robbers do, but even on their mangling and, so to speak, on their blood. And so it came about that men strangled and slain by the brigandage of the judges began to be as it were barbarians, because they were not permitted to be Romans. For they acquiesced in being what they were not, because they were not permitted to be what they had been, and they were forced at least to defend their life, because they now saw that they had utterly lost their liberty. Or what else even now is being done than was done then — namely, that those who are not yet Bagaudae are compelled to become such?
For as regards violence and injuries, they are compelled to wish to be such, but by their weakness they are hindered from being so. Thus they are, then, as it were captives pressed under the yoke of enemies: they endure their punishment of necessity, not of desire; in mind they long for liberty, but they undergo the utmost servitude. (Chapter VII.) So then it fares with nearly all the humbler folk as well: by one and the same thing they are forced into two utterly opposite conditions. The utmost violence demands that they should aspire to liberty, but that same violence does not suffer them to be able, which compels them to wish. Yet perhaps it may be charged against them that they wish this — men who would desire nothing more than not to be compelled to wish it; for their utmost misery is what they wish. For it would go far better with them, if they were not compelled to wish this.
But what else can the wretched wish, who suffer the ceaseless — nay, the continuous — ruin of public taxation, over whom there ever hangs grievous and untiring proscription, who abandon their own homes lest in those very homes they be tortured, who seek exile lest they undergo torments? Gentler to them are the enemy than the tax-collectors. And the very fact proves it: they flee to the enemy in order to escape the violence of taxation. And indeed this very thing, hard and inhuman as it is, would yet be less grievous and bitter, if all bore it equally and in common. This is more shameful and more penal: that the burden of all is not borne by all — nay, that the tributes of the rich press upon the poorest men, and the weaker carry the packs of the stronger.
Nor is there any other cause why they cannot bear it, save that the burden of the wretched is greater than their means. They suffer things most opposite and most unlike: odium and destitution. For the odium is in the payment, the destitution in the means. If you look at what they pay out, you would suppose them to abound; if you look at what they have, you will find them in want. Who can gauge this iniquity? They bear the payments of the rich and the indigence of beggars. Far more than this is what I am about to say: sometimes the rich themselves make additions to the tribute, for which the poor pay. But you say: since their census is the greatest and their assessments the greatest, how can it happen that they should wish to increase their own debt?
Nor do I say that they increase it for themselves; for they increase it precisely because they do not increase it for themselves. I will tell you how. Often there come new messengers, new letter-bearers, sent from the highest exalted powers, who are commended to a few illustrious men for the ruin of very many. New emoluments are decreed for these, new levies are decreed. The powerful decree what the poor are to pay; the favour shown to the rich decrees what the crowd of the wretched is to lose; for they themselves feel in no way what they decree. But, you say, those sent by their superiors cannot but be honoured and received more generously. Then be first, you rich, in contributing, you who are first in decreeing; be first in the largesse of goods, you who are first in the liberality of words. You who give of what is mine, give also of your own.
And yet most rightly, whoever you are who alone wish to reap the favour, you should alone bear the expense. But we the poor acquiesce, you rich, in your will. What you few command, let us all pay: what is so just, what so humane? Your decrees burden us with new debts: at least make the debt itself common to you along with us. For what can be more iniquitous, or what more unworthy, than that you alone should be exempt from the debt, you who make all men debtors? And indeed the most wretched poor thus pay all this that we have spoken of, while they utterly know not by what cause or on what account they pay. For to whom is it allowed to examine why he pays, or to whom is it permitted to inquire what he owes?
But then it is most evidently betrayed, when the rich are angry with one another among themselves, when some of them are indignant that certain things have been decreed without their counsel and consultation. Then you may hear it said by some of them: 'O unworthy outrage! Two or three men ordain what kills many; by a few powerful men is decreed what is to be paid by many wretched.' For each of the rich has regard to his own honour, that he may not have anything decreed in his absence — not to justice, that he may not have unjust things established in his presence. In fine, what they would blame in others they themselves afterward establish, either in vengeance for a slight passed over, or in presumption of power. And through this the most unhappy poor are as it were set in the midst of the sea amid contending storms:
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now, that is, they are overwhelmed by the waves of these, now by the waves of those. (Chapter VIII.) But of course those who in this respect are iniquitous are found in another moderate and just, and compensate the depravity of one thing by the probity of another. For just as in the burden of new levies they oppress the poor, so in the succour of new remedies they sustain them: just as by new tributes the lesser folk are especially depressed, so by new remedies they are especially relieved. Nay, the iniquity is equal in both. For as the poor are first in the aggravating, so they are last in the relieving.
For whenever, as was lately done, the highest powers have judged that ruined cities should be consulted for, or the tributary obligations in some measure diminished, at once the remedy granted to all is shared out among the rich alone. Who then remembers the poor? Who summons the lowly and destitute to a share in the benefit? Who suffers him who is always first in the burden to be even in the last place in the relief? And what more? The poor are not reckoned as taxpayers at all — except when a heap of tribute is imposed upon them; but they are outside the number of the taxpayers, when the remedies are distributed.
And do we think that we are unworthy of the penalty of divine severity, when we thus ever punish our own poor? Or do we believe, when we are ceaselessly iniquitous, that God ought not to be just toward us at all? For where, or among whom, are these evils, save among the Romans only? Whose injustice is so great as ours? For the Franks know not this crime; the Huns are free from these crimes; there is nothing of this among the Vandals, nothing of this among the Goths. For so far is it from the barbarians tolerating these things among the Goths, that not even the Romans who live among them endure them. And so this is the one prayer of all the Romans there: that it may never be necessary for them to pass over into Roman jurisdiction.
There is one and consenting entreaty of the Roman common people there: that they may be allowed to lead the life they lead together with the barbarians. And do we wonder if the Goths are not conquered by our side, when the Romans would rather be among them than among us? And so our own brethren not only refuse altogether to desert from them to us, but even abandon us in order to flee to them. And indeed I might well wonder that not absolutely all the tributary poor and destitute do this — were it not that there is only one cause why they do not, namely that they cannot transfer thither their little belongings and dwellings and households.
For since most of them abandon their little fields and their huts in order to escape the violence of taxation, how would they not wish, were the possibility open to them, to carry off with them the very things they are compelled to abandon? Therefore, because they are unable to do what they would perhaps prefer, they do the one thing they are able to do. They deliver themselves for protection and safeguarding to the great men, they make themselves the dependents of the rich, and, as it were, pass over into their jurisdiction and dominion. And yet I would not think this grievous or unworthy — nay, I would rather rejoice in this greatness of the powerful, to whom the poor deliver themselves — if only they did not sell these patronages, if only what they say they defend, being humble, they attributed to humanity and not to greed.
This is the grievous and most bitter thing: that on this condition they seem to protect the poor, that they may despoil them; on this condition they defend the wretched, that by defending they may make them more wretched. For all these who seem to be defended assign over to their defenders almost their whole substance before they are defended; and thus, in order that the fathers may have defence, the sons lose their inheritance. The safeguarding of the parents is bought with the beggary of their children. Behold what are the aids and patronages of the great: they bestow nothing on those they take up, but on themselves. For by this bargain something is temporarily assigned to the parents, only that in the future the whole may be taken from the children. And so certain of the great sell — and sell at the very heaviest price — all that they bestow.
And when I say they sell, would that they sold in the usual and common manner: perhaps something would remain to the buyers. For this is a new kind of selling and buying. The seller hands over nothing and receives everything; the buyer receives nothing and utterly loses everything. And whereas almost every contract has this in it, that the odium seems to rest with the buyer, the want with the seller — because the buyer buys for this end, that he may increase his substance, the seller sells for this end, that he may diminish it — this kind of commerce is unheard of: the sellers' means grow, to the buyers nothing remains but beggary alone. For that other thing — how monstrous, how not to be borne, a thing that human minds could not, I will not say endure, but...
...could scarcely bear to hear — namely, that very many of the poor and wretched, despoiled of their little belongings and driven out from their little fields, though they have lost the property, yet suffer the tributes of the lost property; though possession has departed from them, the poll-tax does not depart: they lack their estates and are overwhelmed with taxes! Who can gauge this evil? Usurpers squat upon their goods, and the wretched pay the tributes on behalf of the usurpers. After the father's death the sons do not have the little fields of their own right by lawful succession, and yet are done to death by the dues of those fields. And through this, what else is wrought by such great crimes, than that those who were stripped by private usurpation should die by public affliction, and that from those whom plundering took their property, exaction should take their very life?
And so some of those of whom we speak, who are either more prudent, or whom necessity has made prudent, when they lose their dwellings and little fields either by usurpations, or, put to flight by the tax-collectors, abandon them because they cannot hold them, seek out the estates of the great and become the coloni of the rich. And just as those are wont to do who, driven by dread of the enemy, betake themselves to strongholds, or those who, having lost the standing of their freeborn security, flee in desperation to some sanctuary, so these too, because they can no longer maintain either the abode or the dignity of their birth, submit themselves to the yoke of the tenant's abasement.
Reduced to this necessity, so that, as outcasts not only from their property but even from their very condition, and as exiles not only from their own goods but even from their own selves, and losing along with themselves all that was theirs, they both lack the ownership of property and lose the right of liberty. (Chapter VIIII.) And indeed, since so unhappy a necessity compels it, this last lot of theirs was somehow to be borne, if there were not something more extreme. This is graver and more bitter — that a still more savage evil is added to this evil.
For they are received as newcomers, and by the prejudice of their dwelling-place become natives; and after the example of that once-famed sorceress of great power, who was said to change men into beasts, so also all these, who are received within the estates of the rich, are transformed as though by a Circean cup. For those whom they receive as strangers and aliens they begin to hold as though their own; those whom it is agreed to be freeborn are turned into slaves. And do we wonder if the barbarians take us captive, when we make our own brethren to be captives? It is therefore no wonder that there are devastations and destructions of cities. Long have we laboured, by the oppression of very many, that by taking others captive we ourselves too should begin to be captives.
For we feel — even if much later than we deserved, we feel at last — the very things we have done; and, according to the sacred word, 'we eat the labours of our hands,' and to God the just judge we pay what we owe. We had no pity on the exiles: behold, we ourselves are exiles. We took strangers by fraud: behold, we ourselves are strangers and are defrauded. By the prejudices of the times we circumvented men of freeborn status: behold, we ourselves have but lately begun to live on another's soil, yet already we fear such prejudices. And O how great is the blindness of faithless and evil minds! We bear the condemnation of God who judges, and we do not yet acknowledge that we are being judged.
And some of the saints wonder that others are not corrected by our example — others who have as yet endured no such thing — seeing that even we ourselves, who are already smitten by God, are not amended by the torments of our iniquities. O intolerable pride! Very many bear the penalties of their sins, and no one deigns to understand the causes of the penalties. But there is an evident cause which produces this pride, namely that, although we already suffer some things, we do not yet suffer what we deserve. For so great is the mercy of God that, although He wills us to suffer some things for our misdeeds, He nevertheless does not will us to bear them all: because He chastises the wicked, He does not repay evils with evils.
He wills us to acknowledge our sins rather than to bear them — namely, that by pious and salutary scourges He may show us what we deserve to suffer, yet may not inflict what we deserve — according to that saying of the blessed Apostle, when he says: 'Knowest thou not that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? But according to thy hardness and impenitent heart thou treasurest up to thyself wrath against the day of wrath.' And truly we act as the Apostle says. For God calls us to repentance, but we treasure up wrath; God invites us to pardon, but we daily heap up offence. We do violence to God by our iniquities, we ourselves arm the wrath of the Godhead against ourselves:
we compel God, unwilling as He is, to avenge the enormities of our crimes; we come near to not permitting Him to spare us. For since no sign of injustice can ever fall or appear in Him, we act in such a way that, if He does not avenge the enormities of our wickednesses, He may seem to be unjust. (Chapter X.) But of course a man was once a sinner, and perhaps now is not. Or is there any limit to crimes? Is it not rather that men depart from life sooner than from iniquity? For who does not die with his very iniquities, and is buried together with, indeed within, his very crimes? So that of these that prophetic saying may most rightly be spoken:
'Their graves are their houses for ever, and they are compared to the senseless beasts, and are made like unto them.' And would that to beasts! For it had been better to have strayed with brutish ignorance. This is worse and more criminal, that they sinned not through ignorance of God but through contempt of Him. And this, of course, not only the laity but even certain of the clergy; not only the worldly but many even of the religious — nay, men enslaved to worldly vices under the guise of religion:
who, that is, after the disgraces and crimes of their former misdeeds, having inscribed upon themselves the title of sanctity, changed only the name and not the life — by profession, not by conversation — and reckoning that the sum of divine worship lies in the garb rather than in the act, put off only the garment and not the mind. Whence they think themselves the less odiously criminal, who, although they are said as it were to have done penance, no more relinquish the garb than their former ways. For in almost everything they so act that you would think they had not so much done penance for their crimes beforehand, as afterward repented of the very penance itself — nor so much repented earlier that they had lived ill, as later that they had promised themselves to live well.
They know that I speak the truth, and their own conscience bears me witness — many others, but chiefly those religious canvassers for new honours, and, after receiving the name of penance, purchasers of the most ample power which they had not before possessed. So far did they wish to be not only worldly but even more than worldly, that what they had been before did not suffice them, unless they should be more afterward than they had been. How, then, do such men not repent of having done penance — just as those others do not repent of having thought something about conversion and about God, who, while abstaining from their own wives, do not abstain from the invasion of others' property, and, while they profess continence of body, rage with incontinence of soul?
A wholly new kind of conversion! They do not do the lawful things, and they commit the unlawful: they abstain from intercourse and do not abstain from rapine. What are you doing, O foolish persuasion? God forbade sins, not marriages. Your deeds do not agree with your pursuits: you ought not to be friends of crimes, you who say you are lovers of virtues. What you do is preposterous: this is not conversion but aversion. You who long since, as report has it, forsook even the work of honourable matrimony — cease at last from wickedness. And indeed it is just that you should cease from every wickedness; but yet, if not from every one, since this perhaps you deem hard and impossible, at least from the greatest and most monstrous.
Be it so, that near you, whoever you are, neighbours cannot stand; be it so, that the poor cannot dwell there; be it so, that you are a persecutor of many needy men and a devastator of the wretched; be it so, that you are an afflicter of all — provided they be strangers. At last, I pray, spare at least your own; and if not all your own — since even this perhaps you judge burdensome and grievous, to spare all your own — spare at least those of your own who preferred you not only to their other kindred and relations, but even to persons most bound to them and pledges most dear. And why do I say pledges and children? They preferred you almost to their very souls and hopes — not indeed laudably, and he who acted thus himself recognizes his own error.
But what is that to you, nonetheless, to whom the very fact that he erred rendered this service? For you owe him the more on this account, because it was by the excess of love for you that he sinned. He has become as it were blind through affection for you, and is marked and censured by all; yet even so you have been made the more beholden to him, because he made himself blamed by all for love of you. (Chapter XI.) What, then, is there like this among the barbarian Goths? Which of them harms those who love him? Which pursues him who is fond of him? Which is butchered by the sword of one dear to him? You persecute those who love you, you cut off the hands of those who offer you gifts, you slay neighbours who are fond of you: and do you not fear, do you not tremble? What would you do, if you had not already felt the judgment of God present in a near scourging? You add moreover, and join to your former evils, new crimes.
Consider what graver things await you as you do these — since lesser crimes are wont to be avenged even by demons. Be content now, we beseech you, with the brigandage of your friends and companions; let it suffice that the poor have been harassed, let it suffice that the beggars have been despoiled by you: near you almost none is undismayed, none can be secure. More easily are those endured who are hurled from an Alpine crag, or fires driven by the winds are endured. Not so are sailors, so to speak, destroyed, devoured by the voracity of Charybdis or by the Scyllaean dogs, as men say. You drive your neighbours out of their little holdings, those next to you in dwelling and in property. Will you, as it is written, dwell alone upon the earth? For this one thing is what you will not be able to obtain.
For however much you seize upon everything, however much you overrun everything, you will always find a neighbor beside you. Look, I beg you, at others whom, willing or unwilling, you yourself also look up to; look at others whom, willing or unwilling, you yourself also admire. They are loftier than the rest in rank yet your equals in dignity; they are greater in power yet less in humility. You yourself surely know full well the man to whom we now speak and of whom we speak; and you ought to recognize as the very one of whom we now complain the man we honor with this praise. And would that there were many who might be praised: the good health of all would be the nobility of very many. But suppose you do not wish to be praiseworthy: why, I ask, would you wish to be damnable? Why is nothing dearer to you than injustice? Why is nothing more delightful than greed? Why is nothing more precious than rapacity?
Why do you judge nothing more precious than wickedness? Why nothing more excellent than plunder? Learn even from a pagan man what the true good is: for he says, 'One ought to be hedged about by love and goodwill, not by arms.' Thus your own opinions deceive you; the depravity of a corrupt and blind mind deceives you. If you wish to be upright, if you wish to be powerful, if you wish to be great, you ought to surpass others by honesty, not by malice. I once read somewhere: 'No man is evil except the fool; for if he were wise, he would rather be good.' And so you too, if you can still return to soundness of mind, put off wickedness if you wish to possess wisdom. For if you desire to be either wise at all or sound, you must utterly put off and change yourself. Renounce yourself, then, lest you be renounced by Christ.
Repudiate yourself, that you may be received by Christ; destroy yourself, lest you perish. For, as the Savior says, 'Whoever loses his soul for my sake shall find it.' Love, therefore, this so healthful losing, that you may attain to true salvation. For you will not at all be set free by God himself unless you have first condemned yourself. We have spoken at length concerning individuals, and we seem to have overstepped the rule of debate. For without doubt he who reads reflects (if indeed there be anyone who might read for Christ's sake these things written out of love for Christ) — he reflects perhaps about me, or says: since the cause he pursues is a general one, what has it contributed to this business that he has heaped up so much against a single person? Very well — you may suppose — let that man of whom he spoke be such as he says;
yet surely one man's crime does no harm to another man's goodness, or — what is far stronger — is the cause of all men injured by a personal wickedness? Indeed I can prove by clear testimonies that it is injured. For Achan once stole something of the accursed thing by theft, and the crime of one man became the plague of all. David ordered the people of Israel to be numbered, and the Lord avenged his error by the destruction of the whole people. Rabshakeh spoke certain things in insult to God, and struck down a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in slaughter — because the impudent tongue of one profane man had blasphemed. And therefore, not without reason, the blessed apostle Paul also commands that the pestilent man be cast out of the Church, and he shows why he commands it, saying:
'because a little leaven corrupts the whole lump.' From this we clearly recognize that even one evil man is very often the perdition of many. Nor is this a wrong: whoever reads ought to understand that I did not speak above about one evil man superfluously, seeing that the wrath of the divine Majesty is very frequently read to have been kindled even through a single man. But I do not press the matter with the strictness with which I speak. For it is not necessary that we suppose one man to harm all, since all mutually harm one another; it is not fitting that we suppose all endangered through one, since all are endangered through themselves. For all utterly rush headlong into perdition — or at least, to put it more gently, almost all.
For whence comes this good to the Christian people, that the number of the evil should be either less than, or at least equal to, that of the good? O lamentable misery! O mournful misery! How unlike itself is the Christian people now — that is, unlike what it once was! Then Peter, the prince of the apostles, punished Ananias and Sapphira with death because they had lied. The most blessed Paul too expelled even one evil man from the Church, lest by his contact he should defile many. Now we are content even with an equal number on both sides. And why do I say 'content'? It would be more fitting for us to exult and dance for joy, if that parity should fall to our lot.
Behold to what we have fallen back; behold to what, after that purity of the Christian people in which all were once unstained, behold to what we have been reduced — that we should judge the Church blessed if only it had as much good in itself as evil. For how should we not think it blessed, if it had half of the populace guiltless, whom now we bewail as almost wholly criminal? Wherefore, superfluously — since this is so — superfluously did we speak a while ago about one evil man; superfluously did we bewail the crimes of a single man. For either all, or almost all, are to be wept for and mourned. For either very many are such, or at least — which is no less criminal — they desire to be such and strive by the practice of evil deeds to appear no whit inferior.
And by this, even if they do lesser evils because they are less able, they are nonetheless no less evil, since they are unwilling to be less evil if they could be more. In short, in the one thing they are able to do, they are such in their very wish and will, and yield to none; and as far as their means suffice, they strive to surpass. For there is, though in things utterly unlike, that same rivalry among them as among the good: so that just as the good long to conquer all in honesty of mind, so the evil desire to surpass all in depravity. For just as it is the glory of the good that they should be better every day, so it is that of all the evil that they should be worse; and just as the best long to climb to the summit of every virtue, so the worst long to claim for themselves the prizes of every crime.
And this, above all, is to our harm — that is, especially to us Christians, who indeed, as we have already said, count wickedness as wisdom, and about whom God says specifically: 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the understanding of the prudent I will reject.' And though the apostle cries out, 'If any man seems wise, let him become a fool that he may be wise' — which is to say, if anyone wishes to be wise, let him be good, since no one is truly wise unless he is truly good — we, on the contrary, by the striving of evil minds and, as the Divinity says, 'with a reprobate sense,' rejecting goodness as folly and cherishing wickedness as wisdom, believe ourselves daily the more prudent the worse we are.