Letters 260.1–264.3

I am grateful to Your Blessedness for gladly receiving the trial of my speech; for sons of good faith are given boldness when they have been watered by the showers of the paternal fountain. So I provoked you, sweet bishop, not to receive a small libation from a most generous heart, but to drink abundantly from the rich man's great river. I desired the treasure of wisdom, but I received less than I wished; though it should not be called “less” but a gift, which Augustine, oracle of the law, has conferred: consecrator of justice, restorer of spiritual glory, dispenser of eternal salvation. The world knows you as well as it marks you, and you are as known to it as you are approved. So I wish to be fed with the flowers of wisdom and watered with draughts of the living fountain. Grant the one who desires it what will benefit us both. For the native covering of a half-bare oak can grow green if it is privileged to be increased gradually by your streams. So I promise my humble presence, not so much by pen as by prayer, if I may reread Your Reverence's writings instead of seeing you. May divine clemency keep you for countless years, venerable lord. Why has the fountain of the world flowed to me in a small speech? Did it hope that hearts were less fit for its streams? Since every mind lies open to its waters and looks to the eloquent help of religion, it gives welcome showers to the senses, which full faith awaits, hanging from the tree of Christ.

I received your brief letter, but plainly a vehement demander of a long letter from me, not unwillingly but even gladly, not because I could easily satisfy your eagerness, but because I congratulated your charity, since, even if you ask it of one who is not fit, what you ask is good. And for writing a long letter I lack leisure more than ability, being very busy with church cares, from which a few little drops of time barely refresh me, whether in thinking something out, or in dictating things that are more pressing and seem to me likely to profit more people, or in restoring the bodily strength necessary for our service. For words are not lacking with which much paper could be filled; but what you desire from us in that same length of speech, I answer that I am not fit for. For you said you desired the treasure of wisdom but received less than you wished, whereas I beg a daily alms from that treasure with a beggar's prayer and barely obtain it.

And how am I an oracle of the law, of whose broad and hidden inner places I do not know far more than I know, and whose many recesses and shady retreats I cannot approach and penetrate as I wish, and know myself to be nothing but less worthy? Further, who am I to be a consecrator of justice, when it is a very great thing for me to be consecrated? And as for calling me a restorer of spiritual glory (pardon me), you very much do not know to whom you are speaking; for I myself am still being so restored in this glory that I confess it is hidden from me from day to day, not only how much I advance, but whether I advance at all. A dispenser of eternal salvation I plainly am, together with countless other fellow servants of mine. “If I do it willingly, I have a reward; but if unwillingly, a stewardship has nonetheless been entrusted to me.” For to be a dispenser of that salvation through word and sacrament is not yet to be a sharer in it. For if it were not dispensed through good men, the apostle would not rightly say, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” Again, if it were not dispensed through bad men, the Lord would not say of some, “Do what they say, but do not do what they do; for they say and do not do.” So there are many dispensers through whose ministry eternal salvation is reached; but “it is required among dispensers that one be found faithful,” and among the faithful themselves, in whose number may he who is not deceived count me, “one has this gift, another that,” as God has apportioned to each the measure of faith.

So may the Lord rather feed you, dearest and sweetest brother, with the flowers of wisdom and water you with draughts of the living fountain. But if you think anything can be contributed to your most devout zeal through my little work, since I perceive that you are capable and feel that you are eager, you should rather turn your mind to our other works, which are contained in many volumes, than hope for anything through letters that could satisfy your desire. Or at least take what I can give in person, which I think you do not afford us only because you do not wish to; for what great thing is it, with the Lord's help, for you, a man free from duty to any place, to come to us, whether to be with us for a long time or to return after at least a little time?

See, it has almost come about, as you put it in the third of your five verses, that you have a letter of mine more talkative than eloquent. But as for there being seven feet in the fifth and last verse, did the count deceive your ear, or did you want to test whether I still remember how to judge these things, which perhaps those have forgotten who were once devoted to such things and afterwards advanced greatly in church literature?

I do not have the Psalter translated by holy Jerome from the Hebrew. We, however, did not translate, but corrected some errors of the Latin manuscripts from the Greek copies. So perhaps we made something more suitable than it was, but not such as it ought to be. For even now, if things that perhaps escaped us then strike readers, we correct them by comparing manuscripts. So we too, with you, are still looking for what is perfect.

Having read Your Reverence's letter and questioned its bearer about what remained to be asked, I grieved greatly that you chose to deal with your husband in such a way that the building of continence, which had already begun to be raised in him, has lost its perseverance and slid wretchedly into the ruin of adultery. For if he would have been mourned had he returned to his wife's flesh after continence vowed to God and already taken up in practice and habit, how much more is he now to be mourned, plunged into a deeper destruction, committing adultery with such abrupt abandon, angry with you and ruinous to himself, as if he raged more bitterly against you by perishing himself! This great evil happened because you did not handle his mind with the moderation you should have. For although by consent you were no longer united in fleshly intercourse, yet in other things you, as a woman, ought to have served your husband with conjugal obedience, especially since you were both members of the body of Christ. And surely, if you, a believer, had had an unbelieving husband, you ought to have lived in submission so as to win him for the Lord, as the apostles advised.

I pass over the fact that I learned you took up this continence when he did not yet wish it, which was not according to sound doctrine. For he ought not to have been defrauded of the debt of your body before his will too joined yours toward that good which surpasses conjugal chastity; unless perhaps you had not read or heard, or had not paid attention to, the apostle saying: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman; but because of sexual immorality let each man have his own wife and each woman have her own husband. Let the husband render to the wife her due, and likewise the wife to the husband. The wife does not have power over her own body, but the husband; and likewise the husband does not have power over his own body, but the wife. Do not defraud one another, except by consent for a time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer, and come together again, lest Satan tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” According to these apostolic words, even if he had wished to be continent and you had not, he would be obliged to render you the debt, and God would credit him with continence if, yielding not to his own weakness but to yours, he did not deny you marital intercourse, lest you fall into the damnable crime of adultery. How much more fitting was it for you, for whom it was more fitting to be subject, to comply with his will in rendering this kind of debt, so that he too might not be drawn into adultery by the devil's temptation, since God would have accepted your will to be continent, because you refrained from it so that your husband might not perish!

But this, as I said, I pass over, since afterwards, when you were unwilling to consent to render him the conjugal debt, he himself consented to the same pact of continence and lived with you most continently for a long time, and by his consent he himself absolved you of that sin by which you denied him the debt of the flesh. So the question in your case is no longer whether you ought to return to intercourse with your husband. For what you had both vowed to God with equal consent, you both ought to have rendered perseveringly to the end. If he has fallen from that purpose, you at least persevere most steadfastly. I would not exhort you to this unless he had consented to it. For if you had never had his assent, no number of years would have defended you; but after however long a time you had consulted me, I would answer you nothing other than what the apostle says: “The wife does not have power over her own body, but the husband.” By that power he had already permitted you continence in such a way that he too took it up with you.

But what grieves me is that you did not observe this: that you ought to have served him in domestic life the more humbly and obediently, the more devoutly he had granted you so great a thing, even by imitating you. For he had not ceased to be your husband because you both abstained from fleshly union; on the contrary, you remained spouses to each other the more holily, the holier the agreements you kept in harmony. You ought, then, to have done nothing with your clothing, nothing with gold or silver or any money or any earthly possessions of yours without his consent, so as not to scandalize a man who had vowed greater things to God with you and had continently abstained from what he could have demanded of your flesh by lawful right.

In the end it happened that the bond of continence, in which he had bound himself while loved, he broke when despised, and, angry with you, did not spare himself. For, as the bearer of your letter told me, when he learned that you had given all or almost all you had to two passing monks or other, to be distributed as to the poor, then, detesting them together with you, and thinking them not servants of God but intruders into another's house and your captors and plunderers, he indignantly threw off the holy burden he had taken up with you. For he was weak, and therefore, by you who seemed stronger in your common purpose, he should not have been upset by presumption but carried by love; because, even if he was perhaps slow to be moved to give alms more generously, he could have learned this too if he had not been struck by your unexpected expenditures but invited by awaited acts of deference; so that what you did rashly alone, you might both have done much more prudently in harmonious love, and much more orderly and honorably, and the servants of God would not be blasphemed, if indeed they were such, who took so much from an unknown woman and another man's wife in her husband's absence and without his knowledge; and God would be praised in your works, whose partnership would be so faithful that you held in common not only the highest chastity but also a glorious poverty.

But now consider what you have done by your thoughtless haste. For even if I think well of those monks, by whom he complains you were not edified but despoiled, and do not readily agree with a man whose eye is troubled by anger against those who are perhaps God's servants, is it so great a good that you refreshed the flesh of the poor with more generous alms as it is an evil that you undermined your husband's mind from so good a purpose? Or ought anyone's temporal welfare to have been dearer to you than his eternal welfare? If, thinking of a greater mercy, you had put off giving your goods to the poor so that your husband might not be scandalized and perish to God, would God not have credited you with richer alms? So, if you remember what you had gained when you had won your husband to serve Christ with you in a holier chastity, understand by how much heavier a loss you have been struck through those alms of yours, by which his heart was overturned, than are those gains you thought of as heavenly. For if bread broken for the hungry has a great place there, how great a place must we believe that mercy has there by which a man is snatched from the devil, like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour!

Nor do we say this as if we thought that we should desist from our good works if anyone is scandalized by them; but the case of strangers is one thing, that of persons necessarily joined in some partnership another; that of a believer one thing, of an unbeliever another; that of parents toward children one thing, of children toward parents another; and finally, the one most to be considered in these matters, that of husband and wife, where a married woman may not say, “I do what I want with what is mine,” since she herself is not her own but her head's, that is, her husband's. For thus, as the apostle Peter recalls, certain holy women who hoped in God adorned themselves, being subject to their husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, “whose daughters,” he says, “you have become,” speaking to Christian, not Jewish, women.

And what wonder if the father did not want their common son stripped by his mother of the supports of this life, not knowing what he would follow when he reached an older age, whether the monastic profession or the church's ministry or the bond of marriage? For although the children of the saints are to be stirred up and taught toward better things, yet each has his own gift, one this, another that; unless perhaps a father is to be blamed for foreseeing and providing for such things, when the blessed apostle says: “But whoever does not provide for his own, and especially for his household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” And when he was speaking of giving alms itself, he said: “Not that others should have relief and you hardship.” So you should have taken counsel together about everything, and decided together what was to be stored up in heaven and what was to be left for the sufficiency of this life for yourselves and your household and your son, so that others might not have relief and you hardship. And in arranging and doing these things, if something perhaps seemed better to you, you should have suggested it reverently to your husband and followed his authority obediently as your head; so that all of sound mind to whom report of this good of yours could come might rejoice in the fruit and peace of your house, and the adversary might stand in awe, having nothing evil to say of you.

Further, if about giving alms and spending your goods on the poor, a good and great work about which the Lord's commands are so clear, you ought to have shared counsel with your husband, a believer and keeping the holy pact of continence with you, and not to have spurned his will, how much more ought you to have changed or assumed nothing in your dress and clothing without his consent, about which we read nothing divinely commanded! It is indeed written that women should be in seemly dress, and the putting on of gold and braiding of hair and other such things, which are usually used either for empty display or for the allurement of beauty, are rightly censured. But there is a certain matron's dress, in keeping with one's station, distinct from widow's clothing, which can befit married believers while religious observance is kept. If your husband did not want you to lay this aside, lest you parade yourself as a widow while he was alive, I think he should not have been driven in this matter to the scandal of dissension, by the evil of disobedience rather than by the good of any abstinence. For what is more absurd than for a woman to be proud toward her husband over humble dress, when it would be better for you to obey him with shining conduct than to resist him with dark clothes? For even if the dress of a nun delighted you, it could have been taken up more pleasingly after your husband had been respected and entreated than presumed upon without consulting him and in contempt of him. And if he did not permit it at all, what would your purpose have lost? Far be it that you should displease God because, while your husband was not yet dead, you were clothed not like Anna but like Susanna.

For he too, who had already begun to keep so great a good of continence with you, even if he had wanted you to wear a married woman's and not a widow's dress, would not have compelled you to unseemly adornment either; and even if you were forced to it by some harsh condition, you could have a humble heart in proud attire. Indeed, among the fathers, that Queen Esther, fearing God, worshiping God, subject to God, served in submission her husband, a foreign king who did not worship the same God with her. When, in extreme danger not only to herself but also to her nation, which was then the people of God, she prostrated herself before the Lord in prayer, she said in that very prayer that her royal adornment was to her like a menstrual rag; and he who inspects the heart and knew she spoke the truth heard her at once as she prayed so. And she certainly had a husband who was the husband of many women and a worshiper of foreign and false gods. But you, if he too had persevered in the purpose he had taken up with you and had not fallen into crime when offended by you, had a husband not only a believer and worshiping the true God with you but also continent, who, surely not forgetful of your purpose, even if he made you wear married women's clothing, would not have made you wear proud ornaments.

I have written you this, since you thought I should be consulted, not to break your right resolve by my words, but because I grieve over what your husband has done through your disorderly and incautious conduct. You must think most earnestly about his restoration, if you truly wish to belong to Christ. Put on, then, humility of mind, and, so that God may keep you persevering, do not despise your husband as he perishes. Pour out devout and constant prayers for him, sacrifice tears as the blood of a wounded heart, and write to him making amends and asking pardon, because you sinned against him by doing with your goods what you thought should be done without his counsel and will; not that you should repent of having given to the poor, but of having been unwilling to have him as sharer and director of your good work. Promise that for the future, with the Lord's help, if he repents of his shameful conduct and takes up again the continence he deserted, you will serve him in all things, as is fitting; so that perhaps, as the apostle says, God may grant him repentance and he may come to his senses out of the devil's snares, by whom he is held captive at his will. As for your son, since you bore him in lawful and honorable marriage, who does not know that he is in his father's power rather than yours? And therefore he cannot be denied to him wherever he learns he is and rightly asks for him; and so, in order that he may be brought up and taught in the wisdom of God according to your wish, your concord too is necessary for him.

I have received what you wished me to accept from the just and devout labors of your hands, so as not to sadden you more heavily when I saw that you should rather be consoled, especially since you thought it no small comfort if I should wear the tunic you had made for your brother, a holy minister of God, now that, departing from the land of the dying, he needed no corruptible things. So I have done what you desired, and, whatever you may think this comfort, however small, I have not denied it to your heart's love for your brother. I have received the tunic you sent, and when I wrote this I had already begun to wear it. Be of good courage; but use far better and far greater consolations, so that the cloud of your heart, gathered by human weakness, may be cleared by divine authority; and live perseveringly so that you may live with your brother, since your brother died so as to live.

There is indeed cause for tears in not seeing, as you used to, your loving brother, who greatly revered you for your life and your profession of sacred virginity, a deacon of the church of Carthage, coming in and going out and busy in the vigor of his church office, and in not hearing from him those honoring words which he spent on the holiness of his sister with obliging, devout and dutiful affection. When these things are thought of and the force of habit seeks them, the heart is pierced and weeping rises like the heart's blood. But let the heart be lifted up, and the eyes will be dry. For because these things you grieve to have lost have passed in their temporal course, that love with which Timothy loved and loves Sapida has not perished: it remains kept in its treasury and is hidden with Christ in the Lord. Do those who love gold lose it when they put it away? Do they not become, as far as possible, more secure about it when they keep it out of their sight in safer coffers? Does earthly desire think it holds more securely if it does not see what it loves, and does heavenly love grieve as if it had lost what it has sent ahead into the barns above? Note that you are called Sapida, and savor the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, who deigned to die for us so that we might live even when dead, and that death itself might not be feared by man as if it would consume man, nor any of the dead, for whom Life died, be mourned as if he had lost life. Let these and such things be your divine consolations, before which human sadness may blush and give way.

Mortals are not to be blamed for grieving over dear ones who have died, but the grief of the faithful should not be long. If, then, you have been saddened, let it be enough now, and do not be saddened like the Gentiles who have no hope. For the apostle, when he said this, did not forbid being saddened, but being saddened like the Gentiles who have no hope. For Martha and Mary too, devout and faithful sisters, wept for their brother Lazarus who would rise again, although they did not know that he would then return to this life; and the Lord himself wept for that same Lazarus whom he was going to raise. Clearly, that we too may weep for those dead who we believe will rise to true life, he allowed by example, though he did not command it by precept. And not in vain does Scripture say in the book of Ecclesiasticus: “Shed tears over the dead, and begin lamentation as one who has suffered dreadfully”; but a little later it says: “And be consoled because of sadness; for from sadness comes death, and sadness of heart will bend strength.”

Your brother, daughter, lives in mind and sleeps in flesh. Will he who sleeps not rise again? God, who has already received his spirit, will restore to him his body, which he took away not to destroy but postponed to give back. There is no cause, then, for long sadness, since there is a stronger cause for everlasting joy; since not even the mortal part of your brother, which is buried in the earth, will perish for you, the part in which he was present to you, through which he spoke to you and conversed with you, from which he brought forth a voice as known to your ears as the face he offered to your eyes, so that wherever it sounded he was usually recognized even unseen. These things are withdrawn from the senses of the living, so that the absence of the dead causes grief. But since not even these will perish forever, where not a hair of the head will perish, and, laid down for a time, they will be received back so as never again to be laid down, but changed for the better and made firm, surely there is greater cause for rejoicing in the hope of an inestimable eternity than cause for grief in a matter of the briefest time. This hope the Gentiles do not have, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God, who can restore what was lost, give life to the dead, make whole the corrupted, join again what was separated, and keep without end what was corrupted and ended. He who has given faith in these things by fulfilling what he had already promised has promised that he will do them. Let your faith converse with you about these things, since your hope will not be cheated, even if your love is now postponed; meditate on these things, be consoled by these more richly and truly. For if it consoles you somewhat that I am clothed, since he could not be, in the garment you had woven for your brother, how much more and more surely ought you to be consoled that he for whom it had been prepared, needing nothing corruptible, is clothed with an incorruptible garment and with immortality!

As much as your holy zeal gladdens us, so much does it sadden us that, as you indicate, your province is in great danger through harmful and most pernicious errors. But since these things were foretold to come, it is not to be wondered at that they arise, but we must watch that they do no harm. God our deliverer would not allow them to arise unless it were profitable for his saints to be trained even by temptations of this kind. Those people indeed, by their perverse will, earn for themselves both present blindness and future eternal punishment, if through obstinacy they remain unteachable and neglect to correct and amend themselves while they are in this life. Yet, just as they make bad use of the good things of God, who makes his sun rise on the good and the bad and sends rain on the just and the unjust, who calls them to repentance by his patience while they store up wrath for themselves in the day of wrath and of the revelation of the just judgment of God; just as they make bad use of his kindness and patience, that is, of God's good things, while they are not corrected, so, conversely, God makes good use even of their evils, not only for his justice, which will repay them what they deserve at the end, but also for the training and progress of his saints, so that from the very perversity of the wicked the good may advance and be proved and made manifest, as the apostle says: “There must be heresies, so that those who are approved may be made manifest among you.”

For if God had no good use even of the wicked for the benefit of his elect, he who even from Judas's evil gave us so great a good, that we were redeemed by the blood of Christ, could either not have allowed those he foreknew would be wicked to be born, or have extinguished them at the very beginning of their malice. But he allows them to exist only as far as he knows it to be profitable and sufficient for admonishing and training his holy household. Therefore he consoles our sadness about them, since even the sadness we have for them relieves us, while it weighs on them as they persist in their perversity. But the joy we receive when some of them are corrected, changed for the better and joined to the fellowship of the saints, cannot be compared to any joy in this life. That is why it is written: “Son, if you are wise, you will be wise for yourself and your neighbors; but if you turn out evil, you alone will draw up evils”; because, when we rejoice over the faithful and the just, their good profits both them and us; but when we are saddened over the unbelieving and the wicked, both their malice and our sadness harm them alone, while this too helps us greatly before God, that we are mercifully saddened for them and, in that sadness, groan and pray. Therefore, honorable handmaid of God, praiseworthy in Christ, I greatly approve and praise both your sadness over such people and your vigilance and caution against them, which you expressed in your letter; and, as you ask, I exhort and urge you as far as I can to walk perseveringly in this way, to have pity on them as simple as a dove but to beware of them as wise as a serpent, and to strive as much as you can that those who are attached to you remain with you in the right faith or, if some are perhaps perverted in anything, be corrected to the right faith.

As for the man whom the Word of God took up when the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, I would correct something if I found anything false or perverse in what you believe. So believe what you believe: that in that man the Son of God took up our whole nature, that is, both a rational soul and mortal flesh, without sin. For he became a sharer in our weakness, not in our iniquity, so that through the shared weakness he might undo our iniquity and lead us to his righteousness, drinking death from what is ours and offering life from what is his. But if you have any writing of theirs in which they assert something contrary to this faith, please send it, so that we may not only state our faith but also refute their unbelief as far as we can. For no doubt they try to support their perverse and impious views by some testimonies of the divine Scriptures, in which we must show them how wrongly they understand the sacred writings composed for the salvation of the faithful, as if someone were to wound himself gravely with medical instruments, which were surely made not for wounding but for healing. We have labored and labor much, as far as the Lord grants, in refuting various errors. If you perhaps wish to have the works of our labors, send people to copy them for you; for God, who has given you the means, has willed that you can do this very easily.