Letters 16.1–21.6

Longing to be gladdened often by your addresses, and spurred by the discourse with which, a little while ago, you very pleasantly struck at me without breach of love, I have not ceased to pay you back in kind, lest you should call my silence repentance. But I ask that, if you consider these the limbs, as it were, of an old man, you receive them with the indulgence of kindly ears. Greece tells the tale, on uncertain credit, that Mount Olympus is the dwelling place of the gods. But we see and know for certain that the forum of our city is occupied by a throng of saving deities. And indeed, who is so mad, so out of his mind, as to deny that it is most certain that there is one supreme God, without beginning, without natural offspring, like a great and magnificent father? His powers, diffused through the work of the world, we invoke by many names, since we are all evidently ignorant of his proper name. For 'god' is a name common to all religions. So it comes about that, while we approach his members, as it were, one by one with various supplications, we are seen to worship him whole.

But I cannot conceal that I am impatient of so great an error. For who could bear that Miggin should be preferred to Jupiter hurling his thunderbolts, Sanam to Juno, Minerva, Venus and Vesta, and, oh the outrage, the archmartyr Namphamo to all the immortal gods? Among them Lucitas too is looked up to with no less worship, and others without number, names hateful to gods and men, who, conscious of unspeakable crimes, heaping crimes on crimes under the guise of a glorious death, have found, stained as they were, an end worthy of their character and deeds. Their tombs (if it is worth mentioning) are crowded by fools who leave the temples and neglect the shades of their own ancestors, so that the prophecy of that bard who bore it with indignation stands out: 'And in the temples of the gods Rome will swear by shades.' But to me it seems almost as if in this time the battle of Actium had broken out again, in which Egyptian monsters dare to hurl at the gods of the Romans weapons that will not last long.

But I ask this of you, most wise man: setting aside and discarding the strength of eloquence for which you are famous among all, leaving aside also the Chrysippean arguments with which you used to fight, and putting aside for a little the dialectic which strives by the struggle of its sinews to leave nothing certain to anyone, prove by the thing itself who that god is whom you Christians claim as your own and pretend to see present in hidden places. For we worship our gods openly in the light, before the eyes and ears of all mortals, with pious prayers, and make them favourable to us by pleasing sacrifices, and we are eager that these things be seen and approved by all.

But, a weak old man, I withdraw from this contest any further and gladly follow the opinion of the Mantuan rhetor: 'Each is drawn by his own pleasure.' After this, excellent man, who have strayed from my sect, I do not doubt that this letter will be stolen by someone and perish in flames or in some other way. If that happens, it will be the loss of the paper, not of my words, a copy of which I will keep for ever with all religious people. May the gods preserve you, through whom all of us mortals whom the earth sustains venerate and worship in a thousand ways, in harmonious discord, the common father of them and of all mortals.

Are we dealing with something serious between us, or do you wish to joke? For, judging by the way your letter speaks, I am uncertain whether it was due to the weakness of the cause itself or to the courtesy of your manners that you preferred to be witty rather than well prepared. For first came a comparison of Mount Olympus and your forum, and I do not know what it was meant to do, unless to remind me that Jupiter pitched his camp on that mountain when he was waging war against his father, as that history teaches which even your people call sacred, and to make me remember that in this forum there are two images of Mars, one naked, the other armed, whose demon, most hostile to the citizens, a human statue placed opposite holds in check with three fingers stretched out. Would I ever believe that by mentioning that forum you wished to renew in me the memory of such deities, unless you preferred to joke rather than act seriously? But as for your statement that such gods are certain members of the one great God, I warn you, since you deign to hear it, to abstain carefully from sacrilegious jokes of this kind. If you speak of the one God about whom, as the ancients said, the learned and unlearned agree, do you say that those are his members whose savagery, or, if you prefer, power, the image of a dead man holds in check? I could say more on this; for with your prudence you see how wide a field for criticism this point opens. But I restrain myself, so as not to be thought by you to act rhetorically rather than truthfully.

As for your collecting certain Punic names of the dead, with which you thought you could hurl what seemed to you witty insults at our religion, I do not know whether I should refute it or pass over it in silence. For if these things seem to your seriousness as light as they are, I have little time for joking; but if they seem serious to you, I am surprised that, troubled as you are by the absurdity of names, it did not occur to you that you have Eucaddires among your priests and Abaddires among your deities. I do not think these were absent from your mind when you wrote, but in keeping with your kindness and wit you wanted to remind us, to relax our minds, how much in your superstition is laughable. For you could not have so forgotten yourself that, an African writing to Africans, when we are both settled in Africa, you would think Punic names should be ridiculed. For if we interpret those words, what else does Namphamo mean but 'a man of good foot', that is, one whose coming brings some good fortune, as we are accustomed to say that someone has come in 'with a favourable foot' when some prosperity has followed his coming? If you disapprove of this language, deny that, as very learned men report, many things have been wisely committed to memory in Punic books; you must certainly regret having been born where the cradle of this language is still warm. But if our own sound does not reasonably displease us, and you recognize that I have interpreted that word well, you have grounds to be angry with your Virgil, who invites your Hercules to the rites celebrated to him by Evander in this way: 'Come, propitious, to us and to your rites with favourable foot.' He wishes him to come with favourable foot. So he wishes Hercules to come as a Namphamo, over whom you deign to insult us so much. However, if laughing pleases you, you have among you great material for jokes: the god Stercutius, the goddess Cloacina, the Bald Venus, the god Fear, the god Pallor, the goddess Fever, and countless others of this kind, to which the ancient Romans, worshippers of images, built temples and decreed that they should be worshipped. If you neglect these, you neglect Roman gods, from which it is understood that you are not initiated in Roman rites; and yet you despise and look down on Punic names as if you were too devoted to the altars of the Romans.

But you seem to me perhaps to count those rites as nothing, even more than we do, and to catch from them some sort of pleasure for the passage through this life, since you did not hesitate to take refuge in Maro, as you write, and protect yourself with his verse in which he says: 'Each is drawn by his own pleasure.' For if Maro's authority pleases you, as you indicate it does, surely this also pleases you: 'First from heavenly Olympus came Saturn, fleeing the arms of Jupiter, an exile, his kingdom taken from him', and the rest, by which he wishes it to be understood that he and your gods of this kind were men. For he had read the mystical history confirmed by ancient authority, which Tullius too had read, who mentions this same thing in his dialogues more than we would dare to ask, and strives to bring it to people's knowledge as far as those times allowed.

As for your saying that your rites are to be preferred to ours because you worship the gods publicly while we use more secret little gatherings, first I ask you how you have forgotten that Liber of yours, whom you think should be shown only to the eyes of a few initiates. Next, you yourself judge that, when you mentioned the public celebration of your rites, you wanted nothing else than that we should set before our eyes, as in a mirror, the councillors and leading men of the city raving like bacchants through the streets of your town. In that celebration, if you are possessed by a deity, you surely see what kind of thing it is that takes away the mind; but if you are pretending, what are these secrets of yours even in public? Or what is the purpose of so shameful a lie? Next, why do you foretell nothing of the future, if you are prophets? Or why do you rob the bystanders, if you are sane?

Since, then, you have made us recall these things and others which I think should now be passed over, why should we mock your gods, when no one who knows your talent and has read your letter fails to understand that you yourself mock them subtly? So if you want us to discuss something about these matters between us that befits your age and prudence, and that, finally, can rightly be asked of us, given our way of life, by those dearest to us, look for something worthy of our discussion, and take care to say on behalf of your deities things in which we may not think you a betrayer of your cause, reminding us rather of what can be said against them than saying anything for them. In sum, however, so that this may not escape you and draw you unawares into sacrilegious abuse, know that by the Catholic Christians, who also have a church established in your town, none of the dead is worshipped, and, in short, nothing is adored as a deity that was made and established by God, but only the one God himself, who made and established all things. These matters will be discussed more fully with the help of the one true God himself, when I learn that you wish to act seriously.

Oh, if only I could constantly say something to you! And that something is that we should strip off empty cares and put on useful ones. For as to security, I do not know whether any is to be hoped for in this world. I have written and received no replies. I sent the books against the Manichaeans which I was able to send ready and corrected, and nothing of your judgment or reaction to them has been made known to me. Now it is fitting that I ask for them back and that you return them. So I ask you not to delay sending them back with a reply in which I want to learn what you are doing with them, or what further armour you think you need for defeating that error.

Since I know you, receive this thing, great and brief. There is a nature changeable in place and time, such as body; there is a nature changeable in no way in place, but only in time, such as soul; and there is a nature that can be changed neither in place nor in time: this is God. What I have here suggested to be changeable in any way is called creature; what is unchangeable, Creator. Now since we say that everything we say exists, exists insofar as it abides and insofar as it is one, and since the form of all beauty is unity, you surely see in this division of natures what exists supremely, what exists lowest and yet exists, and what exists in the middle, greater than the lowest and less than the highest. That highest is happiness itself; the lowest can be neither happy nor miserable; but the middle lives miserably by inclining to the lowest, and happily by turning to the highest. Whoever believes in Christ does not love the lowest, is not proud in the middle, and so becomes fit to cling to the highest. And this is the whole of what we are commanded, admonished, and kindled to do.

Since we parted from you, words cannot say how much sweetness the memory of you has poured over us and often pours over us still. For we recall that, though the ardour of your inquiry was wonderful, the modesty of your discussion was not disturbed by it. For I could not easily find anyone who questions more fervently or listens more calmly. So I would like to talk with you a great deal; for it would not be a great deal, however much it was, if I were talking with you. But since it is difficult, what need is there to look for the reasons? It is simply difficult. Perhaps it will some day be very easy (may God so will), but now it is certainly otherwise. So I have charged the brother by whom I sent this letter to offer all our writings to your most prudent love for reading. For he will press nothing of mine on you against your will; for I know what kindness you bear toward us in your heart. Yet if you read them and approve them and see them to be true, do not think them ours except in that they were given to us; and you may turn to the source from which it was given to you too to approve them. For no one sees that what he reads is true in the book itself or in the one who wrote it, but rather in himself, if a light of truth, uncommonly bright and very far removed from the dregs of the body, has been impressed on his mind. But if you find some things false and to be rejected, know that they have been sprinkled from a human cloud, and consider them truly ours. I would exhort you to seek, did I not seem to see the open mouths, as it were, of your heart; I would also exhort you to hold manfully what you have known to be true, did you not display the most evident strength of your mind and counsel. For in a short time, with the coverings of the body almost shaken off, what lives in you disclosed itself wholly to me. And may the most merciful providence of our Lord in no way allow that you, so good and so remarkably wise a man, should remain a stranger to the Catholic flock of Christ.

Since letters were owed to you by two of us, a larger part of the debt has been paid most abundantly in that you see one of us present; and since you receive me too from his mouth, I could have not written back, had I not done so at his own bidding, although, since he was setting out to you, what I have done seemed superfluous. So perhaps I talk with you more fruitfully than if I were present in person, since you both read my letter and hear him in whose heart you know very well that I dwell. With great joy I considered and digested the letter of Your Holiness, because it displays both your Christian mind, free of any of the pretence of this wicked time, and your great friendship toward us.

I congratulate you and thank our God and Lord for your hope and faith and love, and I congratulate you before him that you think so well of us as to believe us faithful servants of God, and love that very thing in us with a most pure heart. Though in this matter your goodwill is to be congratulated rather than thanked. For it profits you to love goodness itself, which he certainly loves who loves someone he believes to be good, whether that person is so or otherwise than he is believed to be. In this matter only one error must be guarded against: that no one should think otherwise than truth requires, not about the man, but about the very good of a man. But you, most beloved brother, who in no way err in believing or knowing that it is a great good to serve God willingly and chastely, when you love any person because you believe him to share in this good, have your fruit with you, even if he is not so. Therefore you are to be congratulated on this; but he is not, if he is loved for that reason, but only if he is such as the one who loves him for that reason thinks him to be. So what we are and how far we have advanced toward God, he will see whose judgment cannot err, not only about the good of a man but about the man himself. For your reward of happiness, as far as this matter goes, it is enough that, believing us to be such as servants of God ought to be, you embrace us with the whole bosom of your heart. And we give you abundant thanks that, while you praise us as though we were such, you wonderfully encourage us to desire to be such; and more abundant thanks still if you not only commend yourself to our prayers but also do not fail to pray for us. For prayer for a brother is more pleasing to God when the sacrifice of love is offered.

I greet your little one most warmly and wish him to grow up according to the saving precepts of the Lord. For your house too I desire and pray that there may come the one faith and true devotion, which alone is Catholic. If you think any further help of ours necessary for this, do not hesitate to claim it, relying both on our common Lord and on the right of love. I would certainly advise your most religious prudence to implant or nourish a reasonable fear of God in your weaker vessel by divine reading and serious conversation. For hardly anyone who is anxious about the state of his soul, and therefore intent without obstinacy on seeking the will of the Lord, fails, with the help of a good guide, to discern the difference between any schism and the one Catholic Church.

Before all else I ask your religious prudence to consider that there is nothing in this life, and especially at this time, easier, more pleasant, and more acceptable to people than the office of bishop or presbyter or deacon, if the work is done perfunctorily and with flattery; but nothing more wretched, sad, and damnable before God. Likewise, there is nothing in this life, and especially at this time, more difficult, laborious, and dangerous than the office of bishop or presbyter or deacon; but nothing more blessed before God, if one serves as a soldier in the way our Commander orders. But what that way is I did not learn either in boyhood or in youth. And at the very time when I had begun to learn it, force was put on me, as the due of my sins (for I do not know what else to think), so that the second place at the helm was handed to me, who did not know how to hold an oar.

But I think my Lord wished to correct me in this way because, before I had experienced what is done there, I dared to criticize the sins of many sailors as though I were more learned and better. So after I was sent into the midst, I began to feel the rashness of my criticisms, although even before I judged this ministry most dangerous. And this was the source of those tears which some brothers noticed me shedding in the newness of my ordination; not knowing the causes of my grief, they consoled me with good intentions by whatever words they could, words which had nothing at all to do with my wound. But I have experienced much, very much more than I thought; not because I saw any new waves or storms which I had not seen or heard of or read of or thought of before, but because I did not know my skill and strength for avoiding or enduring them at all, and thought them of some account. But the Lord laughed at me and wished to show me to myself by the facts themselves.

But if he did this not to condemn but to have mercy (and this I certainly hope, at least now that my sickness is known), I must search out all the medicines of his Scriptures, and by praying and reading act so that health of soul fit for such dangerous business may be granted me. This I did not do before, because I did not have the time; for I was ordained just when we were thinking about using that very time of leisure to get to know the divine Scriptures, and wanted to arrange our affairs so that we could have leisure for this business. And, to tell the truth, I did not yet know what I lacked for such a work as now torments and crushes me. But if, having learned in the very doing what is necessary for a man who ministers the sacrament and the word of God to the people, I am now not allowed to acquire what I have recognized that I do not have, do you then order me to perish, father Valerius? Where is your love? Surely you love me? Surely you love the church itself, which you wished me to serve in this way? And yet I am sure that you love both me and it. But you think me fit, while I know myself better; and yet I would not know myself either, had I not learned by experience.

But perhaps Your Holiness says: 'I would like to know what is lacking in your training.' There are so many things that I could more easily list what I have than what I wish to have. For I would dare to say that I know and hold with full faith what pertains to our salvation. But how am I to minister this very thing for the salvation of others, 'seeking not what is useful to me, but what is useful to many, that they may be saved'? And there are perhaps some counsels (indeed, there is no doubt that there are) written in the holy books, by knowing and grasping which a man of God may minister in church affairs in a more orderly way, or at least live with a sounder conscience among the hands of the wicked, or die so as not to lose that life for which alone humble and meek Christian hearts sigh. But how can this be done except, as the Lord himself says, by asking, seeking, knocking, that is, by praying, reading, lamenting? For this business I wished to obtain from your most sincere and venerable love, through the brothers, a little time, say until Easter, and I wish it now through this request.

For what am I to answer the Lord my judge? 'I could not seek these things then, since I was hindered by church business'? If, then, he says to me: 'Wicked servant, if some estate of the church, on the gathering of whose fruits great effort is spent, were suffering from some vexatious claimant, while the field which I watered with my blood lay neglected; if you could do anything for it before an earthly judge, would you not go, with everyone agreeing and some even ordering and compelling you, and, if the judgment went against you, would you not even set out across the sea? And in that case no complaint would call you back from an absence of a year or more, so that another might not possess land needed not for the soul but for the body of the poor, whose hunger my living trees, if carefully cultivated, would satisfy much more easily and more pleasingly to me. Why then do you plead that you lacked the time to learn my husbandry?' Tell me, what am I to answer? I ask you. Or perhaps you want me to say: 'Old Valerius, believing me to be equipped in all things, the more he loved me, the less he allowed me to learn these things'?

Consider all this, old Valerius; I implore you by the goodness and severity of Christ, by his mercy and judgment, by him who inspired in you such love toward us that we do not dare to offend you even for the gain of our soul. You make the Lord and Christ my witness to the innocence and love and sincere affection which you have toward us, as though I myself could not swear to all these things. So I implore that very love and affection: have pity on me and grant me, for the purpose I asked, as much time as I asked, and help me with your prayers, so that my desire may not be vain nor my absence fruitless for the church of Christ and for the benefit of my brothers and fellow servants. I know that the Lord does not despise that love when it prays for me, especially in such a cause, and, receiving it as a sacrifice of sweet savour, will perhaps return me instructed with most wholesome counsels from his Scriptures in a shorter time than I asked.