Letters 121.1–123.1

I will put to you a few of the questions that have come to mind now, as the bearer of this letter is already hurrying to his ship and I am hurried along by his haste, so that you may not write back to me without a little something extra. If perhaps they are clear and only seem obscure to me, let none of the wise sons from among our people who may be standing around you when this little piece is read laugh at my foolishness, but rather let them favor me with the kindness of brotherly love by instructing me, so that I may become a sharer with those who see and who, with minds enlightened by your teaching, consider the wonderful things of the law of the Lord.

Tell me, then, blessed teacher of Israel, what it means that he says in the fifteenth psalm: “To the saints who are in his land he has made wonderful all his wills among them. For their infirmities were multiplied; afterward they hastened.” Whom does he call saints who are saints in the land? Is it those Jews who, being children of Abraham's flesh and not children of the promise, are excluded from the seed that is called in Isaac; saints in the land because they are saints by carnal descent, but earthly in life and mind, minding earthly things and growing old in carnal observance in the oldness of the letter, not reborn into a new creation, because they did not receive him through whom the old things passed away and became new? For perhaps he calls them saints in this psalm in the same way as he calls them righteous in the gospel, where he says, “I did not come to call the righteous but sinners,” that is, those righteous who glory in the holiness of their race and in the letter of the law, to whom it is said: “Do not boast that you have Abraham as your father, for God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” Their type is set forth in that Pharisee who, recounting his righteous deeds as though to a Lord who did not know them, proclaimed them in the temple, not praying to be heard but demanding as a debt the reward of merit for works that were good indeed but not pleasing to God, because what righteousness had built pride destroyed; and he did not even do this in silence but cried it aloud, so that it was clear that he was not speaking to the divine ears, since he wanted to be heard by men too; and therefore he did not please God, because he pleased himself: “Because the Lord has scattered the bones of men who please themselves. They are put to shame,” it says, “because he has despised them,” he who does not despise a humble and contrite heart.

Finally, in the very parable of the gospel in which the figures of the Pharisee and the tax collector are compared, the Lord himself plainly shows what he accepts in a man and what he rejects, as it is written that God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. Therefore he declares that the tax collector went away from the temple justified by the confession of his sins rather than the Pharisee by the reckoning of his righteous deeds. And rightly did that self-praiser go away rejected from the face of God, who, though by his very name he displayed expertise in the law, had forgotten the Lord saying in the prophet: “Upon whom shall I dwell but upon the humble and quiet and one who trembles at my words?” But the other, accusing himself in a contrite heart, is accepted and obtains pardon for the sins he confessed because of the grace of humility, while that holy Pharisee (holy in the way the Jews are holy) carried home the burden of his sins from his boasting of holiness. Of him indeed those Jews are a type of whom the apostle says that, desiring to establish their own righteousness, which is from the law, they did not submit to the righteousness of God, which is from faith; the righteousness that was reckoned to our father Abraham, not from works, because he believed God according to God's omnipotence; before whom he is truly righteous who lives by faith, and is holy not on earth but in heaven, because he walks not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, whose citizenship is in heaven, who glories not in the cutting of the flesh but in the circumcision of the heart, which is done invisibly, not in the letter but in the spirit, whence his praise is not from men but from God.

Next, what he adds in the same verse, “he has made wonderful his wills among them,” I believe he says because he first lit the lamp of the law for them and gave them precepts for living. “He made known,” it says, “his ways to Moses, his wills to the children of Israel.” Then he worked the very mystery of his piety among them: God born in the flesh of a virgin in their nation, and made man from their flesh, of the seed of David; then the mighty works of healing, which he performed among them and before them, being for these things not believed but even blasphemed by them, when they said, “If this man were from God, he would not heal on the sabbath,” and, “He casts out demons only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons.” Because of this mind, blinded by hardened impiety, their infirmities and darkness were multiplied.

But what does he mean by “afterward they hastened”? Was it to repentance, like those in the Acts of the Apostles who, pierced to the heart by blessed Peter's preaching, believed in him whom they had crucified and, hastening to be cleansed from so great a sin, ran to the gift of grace? Or rather, since the powers of the soul are strengthened by faith and the love of God, were the infirmities of the soul multiplied for those impious men, empty of both, as their souls were seized by the deadly sicknesses of the crimes that come from impiety? For Christ is the light and life of believers, and healing is under his wings. Hence it is no wonder if the darkness and infirmities of those who did not receive the life and the light, nor wished to remain under his wings, were multiplied to their destruction; those whom, as he himself declares with weeping in his gospel, he often wished to gather under his wings as a hen gathers her chicks, and they would not. With their infirmities multiplied, then, to what did they hasten? Perhaps to shouting for the Lord's cross and extorting it from an unwilling Pilate with wicked cries, so as to fill up the measure of their fathers, so that these killed the Lord of the prophets whose fathers killed the prophets themselves, by whom it was announced that this Savior of the world would come. “Afterward they hastened”; for “their feet are swift to shed blood; destruction and misery are in their ways, and the way of peace they have not known,” that is, Christ, who says, “I am the way.”

In the following psalm I would like this explained to me, what it means: “Their belly has been filled from your hidden things. They are sated with pork,” or, as I hear is written in some psalters, “they are sated with sons, and they have left what remained to their little ones.”

Again, in another psalm, I am accustomed to marvel, understanding that the Son is speaking to the Father in the fifty-eighth psalm, where, concerning the Jews his enemies, of whom he had said above, “Behold, they will speak with their mouth, and a sword is in their lips,” he says a little later: “Do not kill them, lest at any time they forget your law. Scatter them by your power and bring them down, O Lord.” This we see fulfilled in them to this very day; for they have been brought down from their ancient glory, living without temple, without sacrifices, and without prophets, dispersed among all nations. But why do we marvel that he was already asking through the prophet that they not be killed, when at the very time of his passion, as they were leading him to the cross, he prayed for them, saying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”? But what he added, “Lest they ever forget your law,” as though their life were necessary for this reason even without faith in the gospel, I confess is obscure to me. For what does it profit them toward salvation, which is sought by faith alone, to be occupied with remembering and meditating on the law? Unless perhaps it is for the honor of the law itself or of the race of Abraham, so that the letter of the ancient law may persevere even in the earthly part of his carnal seed, who seem to be counted as the sand of the sea, in case some may be enlightened by reading the law to faith in Christ, who is the end both of the law and of the prophets and shines forth, prefigured and prophesied, in all their books. Or is it because from these impious men is to come the generation of the elect, who, chosen from each tribe, will be sealed by twelve thousands, to whom the very Revelation of blessed John, from the voice of the angel foretelling it, bears this testimony, that they will cling more closely to the retinue of the eternal King, wholly undefiled and without experience of human union? Of them it says specially: “They follow the Lamb wherever he goes, because they have not defiled themselves with women; for they are virgins.”

In the sixty-sixth psalm, besides other things, this is most obscure to me, where it says: “But God will shatter the heads of his enemies, the crown of the hair of those who walk about in their offenses”: what it means to walk about the crown of the hair in offenses. For he did not say “the crown of the head” but “the crown of the hair,” which has no feeling. Does he mean to show a man filled with sins? It is written: “Every heart is in pain, from the feet to the head.” And a little further on, where it says, “The tongue of your dogs from the enemies, by himself”: by whom himself? And can the Gentiles be called God's dogs, whom he himself calls dogs in the gospel? Or perhaps he calls God's dogs those who may be considered such, if any live like Gentiles under the Christian name, whose portion is set with the unbelievers, because they deny by their deeds the God whom they worship in words?

So much for the psalms for now; now I will put forward something from the apostle too. He says to the Ephesians what he had said in another letter about the grades or orders of God's dispositions, the divisions of graces at work by the Holy Spirit: “And he gave some as apostles, some as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints,” and so on. I wish you would distinguish for me, in this diversity of names, what property of office or grace belongs to each name: what is proper to apostles, what to prophets, what to evangelists, what to pastors, and what to teachers. For under all these different names I see a similar, almost single office of teaching treated. And I do not think that the prophets whom he placed after the apostles are those who in the order of time came before the apostles, but those to whom, already under the apostles, there was given by grace either the interpretation of the Scriptures and insight into minds, or the foretelling of the time to come, as Agabus discerned, who both foretold the coming famine and announced in words, and showed by the sign of Paul's belt, what blessed Paul would suffer at Jerusalem. I want to discern what the difference is, especially between pastors and teachers, because both names are usually given to those set over the church.

Likewise, what he says to Timothy: “I urge, then, first of all, that supplications, prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings be made for all men”: I ask you to explain to me what distinction there is in this diversity of words, since everything he said must be done seems to me to belong to the office of prayer.

Likewise, I ask and beg you to expound to me what he says to the Romans; for I confess that I am quite blind in this saying of the apostle about the Jews: “As regards the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but as regards election they are beloved for the sake of the fathers.” How are they both enemies for our sake, we who believed from among the Gentiles, as though the Gentiles could not have believed unless the Jews had refused to believe? Or was the one God, creator of all, who wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, unable to gain both unless he possessed the one in place of the other? Then, “beloved for the sake of the fathers”: how or why beloved, if they do not believe and persist in being enemies to God? “Did I not,” it says, “hate those who hated you, O God, and waste away over your enemies? I hated them with perfect hatred.” Certainly I think this is the voice of the Father speaking to the Son through the prophet in the same psalm where above he had said of the part that believes: “But to me your friends are greatly honored, O God; their rule is greatly strengthened.” And what does it profit them toward salvation, which is obtained only through faith and the grace of Christ, if they are beloved by God for the sake of the fathers? For what good are they loved, who must be condemned for this very reason, that because of their unbelief, departing from the faith of their parents the prophets and patriarchs, they are enemies of the gospel of Christ? If, then, they are beloved by God, how will they perish? And if they do not believe, how will they not perish? If they are loved for the sake of the fathers without any merit of their own, how will they not also be saved for the sake of the fathers? But even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in their midst, they will not save impious sons; they alone will be saved.

Dig up another, still more obscure passage for me from the depths and bring it into the shallows. In the letter to the Colossians I cannot make out at all what he says: “Let no one lead you astray, wishing to do so in humility and the religion of angels, walking in what he has not seen, vainly puffed up by the sense of his flesh, and not holding the head.” Of what angels does he speak? If of hostile and evil ones, what is their religion or what is their humility, and who is the master of this seduction, who under the pretext of some angelic religion teaches as though seen and ascertained what he has not seen? Without doubt the heretics, who both follow and put forth teachings of demons, inventing as though seen phantasms they have not seen, inventions conceived from the demons' spirit, and sowing them with pestilent disputations in hearts that believe wrongly: these are those who do not hold the head, that is, Christ, the source of truth, so that whatever opposes his teaching is insane; and these are blind leaders of the blind, of whom I think it is said: “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug for themselves broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

Then in the following passage he added: “Do not touch, nor taste, nor handle, things which all perish by their very use, according to the precepts and doctrines of men, having indeed a reason of wisdom in superstition and humility, for not sparing the body, not in any honor, for the satisfaction of the flesh.” What are these things, in which the teacher of truth testifies that there is a reason of wisdom, and yet denies that the truth of religion is in them? Is he perhaps speaking of such people as those of whom he says to Timothy, “Having the appearance of piety, but denying its power”? I ask, then, specially that you resolve for me, word by word, these two passages of the letter to the Colossians, because he has mingled execrable things with praiseworthy ones. For what is so praiseworthy as the reason of wisdom, and what so execrable as the superstition of error? Humility too, which is pleasing to God and most praiseworthy in true religion, is attributed, together with the reason of wisdom, to the very people about whose teachings and acts we are told, “Do not touch nor taste” things which perish, because they are not from God, and everything that is not from faith is sin. But God has scattered the counsels of the wise, who are foolish before God through the prudence of the flesh, which cannot be subject to the law of God; for he knows the thoughts of men, that they are vain. I ask what kind of humility and what kind of reason of wisdom he says is present in a superstition that comes from the doctrines of men. And what he says, “for not sparing the body, not in any honor, for the satisfaction of the flesh,” I understand very poorly, because there seems to me to be a great difference within the same sentence. For I think he says “for not sparing the body” of some feigned or useless abstinence such as heretics are wont to affect; and that he added “not in any honor” because, practicing the appearance of holy work not in the faith of truth, they act without the honor or fruit of any glory, which they bring about to the great reproach of their perverse error, transforming themselves into ministers of righteousness. But what he added, “for the satisfaction of the flesh,” seems to me contrary to what he says, “for not sparing the body”; for it seems to me that he does not spare the body who subdues his flesh with fasts, as the apostle says, “I bruise my body and bring it into subjection,” and satisfaction of the flesh is foreign to that work. Unless perhaps by “not sparing the body” he meant also the very care for satisfying the flesh, which is especially disgraceful in those who profess religious observance, contrary to that precept of decency which he gives elsewhere, that each should know how to possess his own vessel in honor, so as to present his body as a living sacrifice pleasing to God, not for the satisfaction of the flesh, because the distension of the body kills the sobriety of the soul and is hostile to chastity.

It remains for me to put to Your Blessedness something about passages of the gospels too; not as many as usually occur to one reading at leisure (for I had no time now to search for them scattered through the books or to stir up my memory to recall them), but I will ask about a few that come to mind at the hour of this dictation. Concerning the form of the resurrection, the letter, not long but full of instruction in the faith, in which you replied to my second inquiry while I was wintering at Carthage: if you have it entered in your files, I ask you to send it, or at least to compose it again for me, which is easy for you. For even if the copy does not survive, because perhaps a short letter, written in haste, was not thought worth keeping among your books, renew it for me with the same sense, drawn from the treasury of your heart, and send it to me among the other answers which, I hope, you will give me, Christ granting you and me provision of days; so that I may receive these answers, by which your labor may bear fruit in me, on these passages of Scripture about which I have questioned you, who see as through God, that I may hear what God speaks to me in you or from you.

But this I ask you to make clear to me: how, or by what reasoning, the Lord after the resurrection, whether to the women who first came to the tomb, or afterward to those two on the road, then to his disciples, was both not recognized and recognized; for he rose in the same body in which he also suffered. And how was the form of the same body not the same as it had been; or, if it was the same, how was it not recognized by those who had known it? That indeed I believe to be a mystery, that he who had not been recognized by those walking on the road was revealed in the breaking of bread. Yet I want to hold this very thing according to your understanding, not mine.

And what he said to Mary, “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father”: if she was not allowed to touch him when he was standing close by, how would she touch him when he had ascended to the Father, unless perhaps by progress in faith and ascent of mind, by which God becomes far from or near to a person? And she had been in doubt about Christ, whom she had thought to be the gardener; perhaps that is why she deserved to hear, “Do not touch me”; for she was judged unworthy to touch with her hand Christ, whom she had not yet grasped by faith nor understood to be God, since she had thought him the gardener, he of whom she had heard from the angels a little before, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” “Do not touch me, then, because for you I have not yet ascended to the Father, you to whom I still seem only a man; afterward you will touch me, when you have ascended by believing to recognize me.”

Explain to me also what you think about those words of most blessed Simeon, so that I may follow your understanding. When he had come into the temple, moved by the Spirit according to God's oracle, to see Christ, and had taken the infant Lord in his arms and blessed him, he said to Mary: “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that will be spoken against; and a sword will pierce through your own soul, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Is he to be believed to have prophesied this of a martyrdom of Mary, which is nowhere recorded? Or rather of her maternal affection, by which afterward, at the time of the passion, as she stood by the cross on which was fixed the one she had borne, she was pierced through with the pain of a mother's heart, and the sword of the cross, which had pierced her son according to the flesh before her very eyes, penetrated her soul? For I see that in the psalms too it is said of Joseph, “They humbled his feet in fetters; iron passed through his soul,” just as Simeon said in the gospel, “And a sword will pierce through your own soul.” He does not say “flesh” but “soul,” in which the affection of love is contained and the sting of pain works like a sword: either when someone is affected by some injury to his flesh, like Joseph, who suffered not death but the sufferings of injuries, sold as a slave, bound as a criminal, and put in prison; or when someone is tortured by the sadness or pain of inward affection, as in Mary, whom her mother's heart had surely led to the Lord's cross, in whom she was then thinking only of the son of her body; so that, when she had seen him dead, she mourned with human weakness and gathered him up for burial, presuming nothing for herself about his resurrection, faith in which, the wonder that was to follow, was blinded by the suffering of the passion set before her eyes. And yet the Lord, not trembling with the weakness of a dying man, consoled her as she stood by his cross, but, holding in his power the very death to which he was going willingly, with the full strength of one who lives and the constancy of one who was to rise again, he admonishes her from the cross, saying of the blessed apostle John, “Woman, behold your son,” and likewise to him as he stood there, “Behold your mother.” That is, departing now through the death of the cross from the human frailty by which he was born of a woman into the eternity of God, so as to be in the glory of God the Father, he delegates to a man the rights of human devotion; and, being young himself, he chose the younger of his disciples, so as fittingly to assign the virgin mother to the virgin apostle. He teaches two things together in the same saying. He leaves us a pattern of devotion, since he is concerned for his mother, so that he would not leave in his care her whom he was leaving in body (though he was not going to leave her even in body, since the one she saw dying she would soon see alive again). And by the hidden reason of divine counsel he designates under this saying the saving mystery of his devotion, which concerns the faith of all: he both delegated his mother to another, to be held as a mother and comforted in his stead, and in turn handed over to her a new son in place of his own body, or rather, so to speak, begot one for her, by which he showed that she, apart from himself, who was born of her as a virgin, neither had nor has a son, since the Savior would not have taken such care for her comfort if he had not been her only son.

But let us return to the words of Simeon, at whose close, I confess, my understanding is clouded: “And a spear,” he says, or “sword, will pierce through your soul, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Taken literally this is wholly obscure to me, because we nowhere read that most blessed Mary was killed, so that the holy man would seem to have prophesied a future martyrdom for her by a bodily sword. But as for what he added, “that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed”: “For God searches hearts and reins,” it says; and the apostle says of the future judgment that God will then make manifest the hidden things of hearts and the secrets of darkness. And likewise the apostle, describing spiritually the heavenly arms with which we ought to be armed in our inner self, calls the word of God the sword of the Spirit, of which he says to the Hebrews: “The word of God is living and effective, and more piercing than any two-edged sword, reaching,” he says, “even to the division of soul and spirit,” and the rest, which you know. What wonder is it, then, if the fiery power of this word, and the edge of a two-edged sword, more piercing, passed through the soul of holy Joseph long ago and afterward of blessed Mary? For we do not know that iron passed through the body of either. And to make it clearer that the prophet there put “iron” for the sword of the word, in the next verse he says, “The word of the Lord set him on fire.” For the word of God is both fire and sword, the Word, God himself, saying both of himself: “I came,” he says, “to cast fire on the earth, and what do I wish but that it be kindled?”, and likewise elsewhere, “I did not come to bring peace but a sword.” You see that he designated the one power of his teaching by the different names of fire and sword. Or how would suffering or tribulation inflicted on Mary by a sword have served that end? So this is what I desire to know: what it had to do with Mary that the thoughts of many hearts should be revealed; or where it appeared that the thoughts of many hearts were revealed as a result of either a fleshly sword of iron or the spiritual sword of the word of God passing through her soul. Explain to me, then, above all this closing clause of Simeon's words, since I do not doubt that it shines clear to your holy soul, which by the purity of its inner eye has deserved the illumination of the Holy Spirit, through whom it can search and look into even the depths of God. May God have mercy on me through your prayers, and make his face shine upon me through the lamp of your word, holy lord, most blessed brother of one mind with me in the Lord Christ, my teacher in the faith of truth and my upholder in the heart of Christ's love.

First of all I ask Your Charity, and beseech you through Jesus, not to let my bodily absence sadden you. For I think you do not doubt that in spirit and in the affection of my heart I can in no way depart from you, although it saddens me more, perhaps, than it does you yourselves that my weakness cannot suffice for all the cares which the members of Christ demand of me, whom both the fear of him and love compel me to serve. For let Your Love know that I have never been absent through self-indulgent freedom, but through necessary service, which has often compelled my holy brothers and colleagues to endure even labors by sea and overseas, from which not any lack of devotion in my mind but my less robust bodily health has always excused me. Therefore, dearly beloved brothers, so act that, as the apostle says, whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you stand firm in one spirit, with one mind laboring together for the faith of the gospel. If some temporal trouble disturbs you, it ought rather to admonish you how you should think of that life where you may live without any labor, escaping not the troublesome straits of a short time but the horrible punishments of eternal fire. For if now you act with such care, such intentness, such labor not to fall into some passing torments, how anxious you ought to be to flee everlasting miseries! And if death, which ends temporal labor, is so feared, how much more is that death to be feared which sends one into eternal pain! And if the brief and sordid delights of this world are so loved, how much more vehemently are the pure and infinite joys of the world to come to be sought! Thinking of these things, do not be slothful in good works, so that you may come to the harvest of your sowing in due season.

For it has been reported to me that you have forgotten your custom of clothing the poor. I exhorted you to this work of mercy when I was present, and I exhort you now, that the distress of this world, to which you see such things happening as our Lord and Redeemer, who cannot lie, foretold would come, may not overcome you and make you slothful. You ought, then, not only not to do fewer works of mercy, but even more than you are accustomed to. For just as those who see the ruin of their house threatening, with its walls cracked, move more hastily to safer places, so Christian hearts, the more they feel the ruin of this world approaching as tribulations grow more frequent, the more they ought to transfer with unwearied speed into the heavenly treasury the goods they had planned to store up on earth; so that, if some human mishap should occur, he may rejoice who moved out of a ruinous place, and if nothing of the kind follows, he may not be saddened who, being bound to die some day, has entrusted his own goods to the immortal Lord to whom he is going. Therefore, my dearly beloved brothers, from what each has, according to his means, which he himself knows, do what you are accustomed to do, with a readier mind than usual, and amid all the troubles of this world keep in your hearts the apostle's exhortation, where he says: “The Lord is near; be anxious about nothing.” Let such things be reported to me about you as will show me that you are accustomed to do, not because of my presence but because of the command of God, who is never absent, what you did for many years when I was present, and sometimes also when I was absent. May the Lord keep you in peace, dearly beloved brothers; pray for us.

Many are lame on both feet, and do not bow even when their necks are broken, keeping their attachment to their former error though they no longer have the same freedom to preach it. The holy brothers who are with our littleness, especially your holy and venerable daughters, humbly greet you. I beg Your Crown to greet in my name your brothers, my lord Alypius and my lord Evodius. Jerusalem has been captured and is held by Nebuchadnezzar, and will not listen to the counsels of Jeremiah; rather it longs for Egypt, so as to die in Tahpanhes and perish there in everlasting slavery.