Letters 155.1–157.5

Although I do not recognize in myself the wisdom you attribute to me, I thank you, and owe you very many thanks, for your goodwill toward me, so great and so sincere, and I am delighted that the labors of my studies have pleased such a great man; but much more that I recognize your mind, moved by love of eternity and of truth and of love itself, longing for that divine and heavenly commonwealth whose ruler is Christ and in which alone one may live always and happily, if one lives rightly and piously here; I see it drawing near and I embrace it as it burns to possess it. For from there flows also true friendship, which is to be weighed not by temporal advantages but drunk with freely given love. For no one can truly be a friend of a man unless he is first a friend of the truth itself; and if this is not done freely, it cannot be done at all.

On this subject the philosophers too have said much; but among them true piety, that is, the truthful worship of the true God, from which all the duties of right living ought to be derived, is not found, for no other reason, as far as I understand, than that they wished somehow to fashion the happy life for themselves and thought it something to be achieved rather than obtained by asking, though its giver is none but God. For no one makes a man happy except the one who made man. For he who lavishes such great goods of his creation on the good and the evil, that they exist, that they are human beings, that they are vigorous in their senses, strong in their powers, abounding in wealth, will give himself to the good so that they may be happy, since it is also his gift that they are good. But those who, in this toilsome life, in these dying members, under this burden of corruptible flesh, wished to be the authors and as it were the founders of their own happy life, as though seeking it and already holding it by their own virtues, not seeking and hoping for it from that fountain of virtues, were quite unable to perceive God resisting their pride. Hence they fell into the most absurd error, so that, while they assert that the wise man is happy even in the bull of Phalaris, they are compelled to admit that the happy life must sometimes be fled. For they yield to the accumulated evils of the body and decide that in their most grievous afflictions one must depart from this life. Here I do not wish to say how great a crime it is for a man to kill himself when innocent, since he ought not to do so even when guilty, on which we have already said much in the first of those three books which you read through so kindly and so attentively. But let it at least be considered, and judged not proudly but soberly, how that can be a happy life which the wise man does not keep and enjoy, but is compelled to be deprived of by laying hands on himself.

There is a passage in Cicero, as you know, at the end of the fifth book of the Tusculans, which deserves attention on account of what I am saying. For when he was treating of blindness of the body and asserting that even a blind wise man can be happy, he mentioned many things in which he could take delight by hearing; and likewise, if he were deaf, he transferred to the eyes the things in which he could find pleasure. But if he were deprived of both senses and became blind and deaf, Cicero did not dare to give a verdict and call him happy, but added also the most severe bodily pains, which, if they did not kill him, he should kill himself, and, freed by this virtue, reach the harbor of feeling nothing. The wise man, then, yields to the most savage disasters and succumbs to such a degree that he is compelled by them even to commit homicide against himself. Whom will he spare, to be rid of those evils, who does not spare himself? Surely he is always happy; surely the happy life, placed in his own power, can be lost by no force of any calamity! See: in blindness and deafness and the most atrocious torments of the body, he has either lost the happy life, or, if it is still happy even in these afflictions, it results from the disputations of such very learned men that there is sometimes a happy life which the wise man cannot bear, or, what is more absurd, which the wise man ought not to bear, and flees it, breaks it off, casts it away, and withdraws himself from it by the sword or by poison or by some other voluntary death, so that in the harbor of feeling nothing he either does not exist at all (as the Epicureans and any others of similar folly thought), or is happy precisely because he has been freed from that happy life as from some plague. O too proud boasting! If the life in bodily torments is happy, why does the wise man not remain in it to enjoy it? But if it is miserable, what, I ask you, prevents him, except pride, from admitting it, from praying to God, from supplicating the just and merciful one, who is able either to avert or to mitigate the evils of this life, or to arm us with fortitude to bear them, or to free us from them altogether, and after them to give a truly happy life, into which no evil is admitted and where the highest good is never lost?

This is the reward of the godly, in the hope of obtaining which we lead this temporal and mortal life not so much with delight as with endurance, and bear its evils bravely by good counsel and divine gift, when we rejoice in the faithful promise of God and in our own faithful expectation of eternal goods. Exhorting us to this, the apostle says: "Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"; for by putting "rejoicing in hope" first he showed why we are "patient in tribulation." To this hope I exhort you through Jesus Christ our Lord. For God himself, as teacher, with the majesty of his divinity hidden and the weakness of the flesh apparent, taught this not only by the oracle of his word but also by the example of his passion and resurrection: in the one he showed what we ought to endure, in the other what we ought to hope for. The philosophers too would have deserved his grace, if, lifted up and puffed up with pride, they had not vainly tried to make this happy life for themselves, which God alone has truly promised that he will lavish on his worshipers after this life. Sounder, indeed, is that opinion of the same Cicero, where he says: "For this life is indeed death, which I could lament if I wished." How, then, if it is rightly lamented, is it proved happy, and not rather, since it is rightly lamented, shown to be miserable? So accustom yourself, I beg you, good sir, to be happy in the meantime in hope, so that you may also be so in reality, when the reward of eternal happiness is repaid to most persevering piety.

If I am burdensome with a long letter, you brought this on yourself by calling me wise. For this is why I have dared to say these things to you: not to display to you wisdom such as I have, but to show what it ought to be. In this present world it is the true worship of the true God, so that its fruit in the world to come may be sure and complete: here most constant piety, there everlasting happiness. If I have anything of this wisdom, which alone is true, I have received it from God, not presumed it from myself, and I faithfully hope that it will be perfected in me by him, from whom I humbly rejoice that it has begun, neither unbelieving in what he has not yet given nor ungrateful for what he has already given. For if I am anything praiseworthy, I am so not by my own talent or merit but by his gift. For some most acute and excellent minds have gone into the greater errors the more presumptuously they ran as though by their own strength, and did not humbly and truly ask God to show them the way. As for the merits of any human beings, what are they, since he who came not with wages owed but with grace freely given found all men sinners, he alone free from sin and the liberator from it?

If, then, true virtue delights us, let us say to him what we read in his sacred writings: "I will love you, O Lord, my strength"; and if we wish to be truly happy, which we cannot not wish, let us hold with faithful heart what we have learned in the same writings: "Blessed is the man whose hope is the name of the Lord, and who has not looked to vanities and lying follies." But how great is the vanity, how great the folly, and how great the lie, that a mortal man, leading a toilsome life with changeable spirit and flesh, burdened with so many sins, subject to so many temptations, liable to so many corruptions, and destined for most just punishments, should trust in himself in order to be happy, when he cannot even claim from errors that which is chief in the dignity of his nature, namely mind and reason, unless God, the light of minds, is present! Let us cast away, then, I beg you, the vanities and lying follies of false philosophers, since we shall neither have virtue unless he himself is present to help us, nor happiness unless he himself is present for us to enjoy, and he swallows up all that is changeable and corruptible in us, which of itself is weak and a kind of material of miseries, by the gift of immortality and incorruption.

But since we know you to be a lover of the commonwealth, see how clear it is in those sacred writings that a man is not happy from one source and a city from another. For in them someone filled with the Holy Spirit says this in prayer: "Rescue me from the hand of strange children, whose mouth has spoken vanity and their right hand is a right hand of iniquity; whose sons are like young plants established in their youth, their daughters adorned and decked like the likeness of a temple; their storehouses full, overflowing from this to that; their sheep fruitful, multiplying in their goings forth; their oxen fat. There is no breach of the wall, nor passage, nor outcry in their streets. They have called the people happy who have these things; happy is the people whose God is the Lord."

You see that a people is called happy for heaping up earthly prosperity only by the strange children, that is, by those who do not belong to the regeneration by which we are made sons of God; from whose hand the psalmist prays to be rescued, lest he be drawn by them into this opinion and into impious sins. For speaking vanity, they called the people happy who have the things he mentioned above, in which consists that prosperity which alone the lovers of this world seek. And therefore their right hand is a right hand of iniquity, because they have put first what ought to have been put after, as the right hand is preferred to the left. For if these things are possessed, the happy life is not to be placed in them; they ought to be subordinate, not in charge; following, not leading. Now to this man who prayed thus and desired to be rescued and separated from the strange children who called the people happy who have these things, suppose we said: "What do you yourself think? Which people do you call happy?" He does not say: "Happy is the people whose strength is the virtue of its own mind." Had he said that, he would indeed have distinguished this people from the one which places the happy life in this visible and bodily prosperity, but he would not yet have transcended all vanities and lying follies. For "cursed is everyone," as the same writings teach elsewhere, "who places his hope in man"; therefore no one ought to place it in himself, since he too is a man. Accordingly, in order to pass beyond the bounds of all vanities and lying follies and to place the happy life where it truly is, he said: "Happy is the people whose God is the Lord."

You see, then, where we must seek what all, learned and unlearned, desire, and what many, through error and pride, do not know where to seek or where to receive. Both are rebuked together in a certain divine psalm: those who trust in their own strength and those who glory in the abundance of their riches, that is, both the philosophers of this world and those who shrink even from such philosophy and call the people happy which has earthly wealth in plenty. And therefore let us ask from the Lord our God, by whom we were made, both the virtue by which to overcome the evils of this life and the happy life by which to enjoy him in his eternity after this life, so that, both in virtue and in the reward of virtue, as the apostle says, "let him who glories glory in the Lord." This let us wish for ourselves, this for the city of which we are citizens; for a city is not happy from one source and a man from another, since a city is nothing else than a harmonious multitude of human beings.

Therefore, if all your prudence, by which you try to provide for human affairs; all your fortitude, by which you are terrified by no one's opposing iniquity; all your temperance, by which, amid such a great plague of the most wicked custom of men, you keep yourself from corruption; all your justice, by which, judging rightly, you give each his own, labor and strive for this alone, that those whom you wish to be well off may be safe in body, secure from anyone's dishonesty, and at peace, may have sons like young plants established, daughters adorned like the likeness of a temple, storehouses full and overflowing from this to that, fruitful sheep, fat oxen, no breach of the wall disfiguring their estate, no outcry of litigants sounding in their streets, then your virtues will not be true, just as their happiness will not be. For here that modesty of mine, which you praised so kindly in your letter, must not prevent me from speaking the truth. If, I say, your whole administration, equipped with the virtues I have mentioned, is bounded by this end of its intention, that people should suffer no unjust troubles according to the flesh, and you do not think it your concern to what end they refer this quiet which you strive to provide, that is (not to beat about the bush), how they worship the true God, in whom is all the fruit of a quiet life, then all this great labor profits you nothing for the truly happy life.

I seem to say this too immodestly, and as it were to have forgotten the custom of my intercessions. But if modesty is nothing but a certain fear of displeasing, in this case I am not modest because I fear. For I fear that I would justly displease first God, then the very friendship which you have deigned to enter with me, if I were less free in admonishing you about what I think it most wholesome to admonish. Let me indeed be more modest when I intercede with you for others, but when I do so for you yourself, the freer the more friendly I am, because the more friendly the more faithful; although I would not say these very things unless I were acting modestly. If modesty is, as you yourself wrote, "the most effective means among good men in difficult matters," let it help me with you on your behalf, so that I may enjoy you in him who gave me this door and this confidence toward you, especially since I think that what I suggest is already easy for your mind, supported and equipped with so many divine gifts.

For if, perceiving from whom you received the virtues you have received and giving thanks to him, you devote them to his worship even in these secular honors of yours, and raise up and lead the people subject to your power to worship him, both by the example of your religious life and by your very zeal for their good, whether by encouraging or by frightening them, and wish nothing else in their living more securely through you than that they may thereby win him with whom they will live happily, then those virtues will be true, and by the help of him by whose generosity they were given they will so grow and be perfected that they will bring you without any doubt to the truly happy life, which can only be eternal. There evils will no longer be prudently distinguished from goods, for there will be none; nor adversities bravely endured, for there will be nothing there but what we love, nothing that we must endure; nor lust temperately bridled, where we shall feel none of its incitements; nor the needy justly helped with aid, where we shall have no one poor or needy. There will be one virtue there, and the very same thing will be virtue and the reward of virtue, which the man who loves it speaks of in the holy oracles: "But for me it is good to cling to God." This there will be full and everlasting wisdom, and the same will be the life now truly happy; for it is the arrival at the eternal and highest good, to cling to which forever is the end of our good. Let this also be called prudence, because it will cling most foresightedly to a good that cannot be lost; and fortitude, because it will cling most firmly to a good from which it cannot be torn; and temperance, because it will cling most chastely to a good where it cannot be corrupted; and justice, because it will cling most rightly to a good to which it is deservedly subject.

Yet even in this life virtue is nothing but loving what ought to be loved: to choose it is prudence; to be turned from it by no troubles is fortitude; by no allurements, temperance; by no pride, justice. But what should we choose to love above all, except that than which we find nothing better? This is God; and if in loving we put anything before him or on a level with him, we do not know how to love ourselves. For it is the better for us, the more we go toward him than whom nothing is better. And we go not by walking but by loving. We shall have him the more present, the purer we can make that very love by which we tend toward him; for he is neither extended nor enclosed in bodily places. To him, then, who is everywhere present and everywhere whole, one may go not with feet but with conduct. And our conduct is usually judged not by what each knows but by what he loves; and only good or bad loves make good or bad conduct. By our crookedness, then, we are far from God's rightness; hence by loving what is right we are corrected, so that, being right, we may cling to the Right.

Let us strive, then, with all the effort we can, that those too may come to him whom we love as ourselves, if we already know how to love ourselves by loving him. For Christ, that is, the Truth, says that on these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets: that we love God with our whole heart and our whole soul and our whole mind, and love our neighbors as ourselves. "Neighbor" in this passage is to be reckoned not by kinship of blood but by fellowship of reason, in which all human beings are fellows. For if a reckoning of money makes partners, how much more the reckoning of nature, common by the law not of trading but of birth! Hence that comic poet too (for the brightness of truth is not lacking to splendid minds), when he composed a dialogue in which one old man said to another: "Have you so much leisure from your own affairs that you look after other people's, which do not concern you at all?", gave the other's answer: "I am a man; I consider nothing human foreign to me." They say that whole theaters full of foolish and unlearned people applauded this sentence. So naturally did the fellowship of human souls touch the feelings of all, that no one there felt himself anything but the neighbor of any human being.

Since, then, with that love which the divine law commands, a man ought to love God and himself and his neighbor, yet three commandments were not given on this account, nor was it said "on these three," but "on these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets," that is, on love of God with the whole heart, the whole soul, and the whole mind, and of the neighbor as oneself; evidently so that it might be understood that there is no other love by which anyone loves himself except his loving God. For whoever loves himself otherwise should rather be said to hate himself; for he becomes unjust and is deprived of the light of justice when, turned away from the better and more excellent good, and turned even toward himself, he is turned toward lower and needy things, and there is fulfilled in him what is most truly written: "But he who loves iniquity hates his own soul." Because, then, no one loves himself except by loving God, there was no need, when the commandment of love of God had been given, for a man to be commanded also to love himself, since in loving God he loves himself. He ought, then, to love both God and his neighbor as himself, so that he may lead whatever human being he can to worship God, whether by the consolation of kindness, by instruction in doctrine, or by the restraint of discipline, knowing that on these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets.

He who chooses this with sober discernment is prudent; he who is turned from it by no affliction is brave; by no other delight, temperate; by no pride, just. By these virtues, imparted by God through the grace of the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who is God with the Father and man with us, through whom after the enmities of iniquity we are reconciled to God in the Spirit of love; by these virtues, I say, imparted by God, a good life is now led, and afterward its reward is paid, the happy life, which can only be eternal. For here these same virtues are in action, there in effect; here in work, there in wages; here in duty, there in goal. Therefore all the good and holy, even in any torments whatever, supported by divine help, are called happy in the hope of that goal, in which they will be happy; for if they were always in those same torments and most atrocious pains, no sound reason would doubt that they were miserable, whatever virtues they had.

Piety, then, that is, the true worship of the true God, is profitable for all things, both for averting or lessening the troubles of this life and for leading to that life and salvation where we shall suffer no more evil and shall enjoy the highest and everlasting good. To attain this more perfectly and to keep it most perseveringly I exhort you, as I do myself. Unless you already shared in it and judged that these temporal honors of yours ought to serve it, you would not have said to the Donatist heretics in an edict meant to bring them back into the unity and peace of Christ: "This is done for your sake; for your sake the priests of incorrupt faith, for your sake the emperor Augustus, for your sake we his judges also labor," and much else which you put in the same edict in such a way that it is evident that, in the belt of an earthly judge, you are thinking in no small measure of the heavenly commonwealth. So if I have wished to speak at greater length with you about true virtues and the true happy life, I ask that I not be thought burdensome to your occupations; indeed, I am confident that I am not, since you have so great and so wonderfully praiseworthy a mind that you neither abandon those cares and are more gladly and more familiarly occupied with these.

The grace of your Holiness, which is known to all, has persuaded my littleness, as our people were returning from Syracuse to Hippo, to dispatch this letter to commend myself to your Reverence, asking the supreme Trinity that, safe and vigorous by the favor of our God, you may receive this writing of mine to read, holy lord, rightly and deservedly venerable and to be honored in all things. Accordingly, I ask that you deign to remember me in your holy prayers and to instruct our ignorance concerning what certain Christians at Syracuse set forth, saying: that a man can be without sin and keep the commandments of God easily, if he wishes; that an unbaptized infant overtaken by death cannot deservedly perish, since it is born without sin; that a rich man who remains in his riches cannot enter the kingdom of God unless he has sold all he has, and that it cannot profit him if he has kept the commandments with those riches; that one ought not to swear at all; and concerning the church, of which it is written that it has no wrinkle or spot, whether it is this one in which we now gather or the one we hope for. Someone, however, maintained that the church is this one in which we now assemble with the people, and that it cannot be without sin. On all these matters I ask your Holiness, with all the prayers I can, to have us instructed more clearly, so that we may know how far we ought to hold. May the mercy of our God keep your Holiness safe for countless years, I pray, holy lord, rightly and deservedly venerable and to be honored in all things.

From your letter I have learned not only of your safety but also of your religious zeal for the word of God and your godly concern for your salvation, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Giving thanks to God for this, I have not delayed to send my reply.

If, then, you ask whether anyone in this life advances in the perfection of righteousness so far as to live here entirely without any sin, consider what the apostle John said, whom the Lord especially loved among his disciples: "If we say," he says, "that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." If, then, those about whom you wrote to me say that they are without sin, you see that they deceive themselves and the truth is not in them. But if they confess that they are sinners, so that they may obtain God's mercy, let them also refrain from deceiving others, whom they try to persuade of this pride. For the Lord's Prayer is necessary for all; the Lord gave it even to the very rams of the flock, that is, to his apostles, so that each might say to God: "Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors." Anyone for whom these words in the prayer were not necessary would have to be declared to live here without sin. If the Lord had foreseen that there would be any such people, certainly better than his apostles were, he would have taught them another prayer, in which they would not ask for the forgiveness of sins, all of which had already been forgiven them in baptism. For if holy Daniel, not before men with a deceitful humility but before God, that is, in the prayer in which he besought God, confessed not only the sins of his people but also his own, as was expressed by his truthful mouth, nothing else seems to me to need saying to these people than what the Lord says through the prophet Ezekiel to a certain proud man: "Are you wiser than Daniel?"

But plainly, whoever, helped by God's mercy and grace, abstains from those sins which are also called crimes, and does not neglect to cleanse by works of mercy and godly prayers those sins without which one does not live here, will deserve to depart from here without sin, although while he lived here he had some sins; because, just as these were not lacking, so the remedies by which they could be purged were also present. But whoever, having found this as it were an occasion, on hearing that no one lives here without sin by his own choice, gives himself up to lusts, binds himself with heinous crimes, and continues in these criminal and wicked ways to his last day, whatever alms he may give in the meantime, both lives unhappily and ends more unhappily.

But these people are in some way to be tolerated when they say that there is or has been someone righteous here, besides the one Holy of holies, who had no sin at all. But what they say, that free choice suffices for a man to fulfill the Lord's commandments even if he is not helped toward good works by God's grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit, must be anathematized in every way and detested with every execration. For those who assert this are wholly strangers to the grace of God, because, as the apostle says of the Jews, "being ignorant of the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they have not submitted to the righteousness of God." For the fullness of the law is nothing but love, and certainly "the love of God has been poured into our hearts," not through ourselves or by the powers of our own will, but "through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

Free choice, then, has power for good works if it is helped by God, which comes about by humbly asking and confessing; but deserted by divine help, however much it excels in knowledge of the law, it will in no way have the solidity of righteousness, but the inflation of impious pride and a deadly swelling. The Lord's Prayer itself teaches this. For we say to God in vain, "Lead us not into temptation," if this has been placed in our power in such a way that we can accomplish it without any help from him. For it is said, "Lead us not into temptation," which is understood as: "Do not, by deserting us, allow us to be led into it." For "God is faithful," says the apostle, "who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make a way out, so that you may be able to endure." Why did he say that God does this, if it lies in our power alone without his help?