Letters 27.1–28.5

O good man and good brother, you were hidden from my soul. And I tell it to bear patiently that you are still hidden from my eyes; and it scarcely obeys me, or rather it does not obey. Or does it bear it? Why then does longing for you torment me within my very soul? For if I suffered bodily troubles and they did not disturb the evenness of my mind, I would rightly be said to bear them; but since I do not bear with an even mind that I do not see you, it is unbearable to call this bearing. But since you are such as you are, to be without you and bear it would perhaps be more unbearable still. It is well, then, that I cannot bear it with an even mind; for if I bore it with an even mind, I would not deserve to be borne with an even mind. What has happened to me is strange, but true: I grieve that I do not see you, and the grief itself consoles me. So I dislike the fortitude with which the absence of good men such as you is patiently borne. For we certainly long for the Jerusalem to come, and the more impatiently we long for it, the more patiently we endure all things for its sake. Who, then, can fail to rejoice at seeing you, so as to be able not to grieve as long as he does not see you? So I can do neither, and, since if I could I would be monstrous, I am glad that I cannot, and in being glad there is some consolation. So, though I grieve, my grief consoles me, not by being calmed but by being considered. Do not rebuke me, I beg, with the holier gravity in which you excel, and say that I do wrong to grieve that I do not yet know you, when you have opened your mind to me, that is, your inner self, to look upon. What then? If anywhere, even in your earthly city, I had learned of you as my brother and one who loves me, and so great and such a man in the Lord, would you think I would feel no grief if I were not allowed to know your house? How then should I not grieve that I do not yet know your face, that is, the house of your soul, which I know as I know my own?

For I have read your letter flowing with milk and honey, displaying the simplicity of your heart, in which you seek the Lord, thinking of him in goodness, and bringing him glory and honour. The brothers have read it and rejoice tirelessly and inexpressibly at such abundant and excellent gifts of God, your good gifts. All who have read it snatch it away, because they are carried away when they read it. How sweet is the fragrance of Christ that breathes from it, words cannot say. That letter, in offering you to be seen, how much it rouses us to seek you! For it makes you both visible and desirable. The more it shows us your presence in a way, the less it allows us to bear your absence. All love you in it and desire to be loved by you. God is praised and blessed, by whose grace you are such. There Christ is roused to deign to calm the winds and seas for you as you make your way toward his stability. There readers see a wife who does not lead her husband to softness but is led back to strength, into the bones of her husband; brought back and restored into unity with you, and joined to you by spiritual bonds all the firmer for being chaster, she is greeted by us in return in you alone, with the respects due to your holiness. There the cedars of Lebanon, laid on the ground and raised up by the joinery of love into the building of the ark, cut through the waves of this world without decay; there glory is despised that it may be gained, and the world left that it may be won; there the little ones, or even the somewhat older children of Babylon, are dashed against the rock, namely the vices of confusion and worldly pride.

These and other such most sweet and most holy sights your letter offers its readers: that letter, a letter of unfeigned faith, a letter of good hope, a letter of pure love. How it breathes out to us your thirst, and the longing and fainting of your soul for the courts of the Lord! What a most holy love it exhales! What wealth of a sincere heart it pours forth! What thanks it gives to God! What it obtains from God! Is it more gentle or more ardent? More luminous or more fruitful? What is it that so soothes us, so kindles us, so rains on us, and yet is so serene? What is it, I ask you, or what shall I repay you for it, except that I am wholly yours in him whose you are wholly? If this is little, I certainly have no more; but you have made it seem not little to me, since you deigned to honour me in that letter with such praises that, in giving myself back to you, if I thought this little, I would be convicted of not having believed you. I am ashamed indeed to believe so much good about myself, but I am more reluctant not to believe you. There is something I can do. I will not believe myself such as you think, since I do not recognize it, and I will believe that I am loved by you, since I feel it and plainly perceive it. In this way I shall be neither rash about myself nor ungrateful to you. And when I offer myself wholly to you, it is not little; for I offer one whom you love most ardently, and I offer, if not such a one as you think me, yet one for whom you pray that he may deserve to be such. For this I now ask you to do even more, lest you wish less to be added to what I am, while you think that I already am what I am not.

See, he who brings this letter to Your Excellency and your most excellent Love is very dear to me and has been my close friend from early youth. His name is in the book On Religion, which Your Holiness, as you indicate in your letter, reads with great pleasure; for it has become all the more pleasing to you by the commendation of so great a man, who sent it to you. Yet I would not want you to believe what this so intimate friend of mine may perhaps say in praise of me. For I have noticed that he too often errs in his judgment, not from a desire to lie but from a bent to love, and thinks that I have already received certain things which I gape for with the open mouth of my heart to receive from the Lord. And if he does this to my face, who would not guess how many things, better than true, he joyfully pours out about me when I am absent? He will provide your venerable zeal with a supply of our books; for I do not know that I have written anything, either for the ears of those outside the church of God or for the brothers, that he does not have. But when you read, my holy Paulinus, do not let the things which truth speaks through our weakness so carry you away that you attend less carefully to the things I speak myself, lest, while you eagerly drink in the good and right things given me to minister, you fail to pray for the sins and errors that I myself commit. For in the things that will rightly displease you, if you notice them, I myself am seen; but in the things in my books that rightly please you through the gift of the Spirit you have received, he is to be loved, he is to be proclaimed, with whom is the fountain of life, and in whose light we shall see light without a riddle and face to face, whereas now we see in a riddle. In the things, then, which I myself belched up from the old leaven, when I recognize them on reading, I judge myself with grief; but in those which by the gift of God I spoke from the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, I exult with trembling. For what do we have that we have not received? But, you say, one who is rich in greater and more gifts of God is better than one rich in lesser and fewer. Who denies it? But again, it is better to give thanks to him even for a small gift of God than to wish to be thanked oneself for a great one. Pray for me, brother, that I may always confess these things from the heart and that my heart may not be out of tune with my tongue; pray, I implore you, that, not wishing to be praised but praising, I may call upon the Lord, and I shall be saved from my enemies.

There is also another reason for you to love this brother more; for he is a relative of the venerable and truly blessed bishop Alypius, whom you embrace with your whole heart, and rightly. For whoever thinks kindly of that man thinks of the great mercy of God and of God's wonderful gifts. So when Alypius had read your request, in which you indicated that you wanted him to write his story for you, he both wished to do it because of your goodwill and did not wish to because of his modesty. When I saw him wavering between love and shame, I transferred the burden from him to my own shoulders; for he ordered me to do this too by letter. Soon, then, if the Lord helps, I shall put the whole Alypius into your heart. For what I feared most was that he would be afraid to disclose all that the Lord has bestowed on him, lest to someone less understanding (for it would not be read by you alone) he might seem to proclaim not divine gifts granted to men but himself; and that you, who know how to read these things, might be cheated of what brotherly acquaintance owes you, for the sake of guarding against the weakness of others. I would have done this already and you would be reading him now, had not this brother's departure suddenly been decided, unexpectedly. I commend him so to your heart and tongue that you may show yourself as friendly to him as if you had come to know him not now but long ago, together with me. For if he does not hesitate to open himself to your heart, he will be healed wholly or in great part through your tongue. For I want him to be struck more often by the voices of those who love a friend not in a worldly way.

His son, our son, whose name you will also find in some of our books, I had decided to hand over into your hands by letter, even if he were not going himself into the presence of your Love, to be consoled, exhorted and instructed not so much by the sound of your mouth as by the example of your strength. For I burn with desire that, while his age is still the green blade, he may turn the tares into grain and believe those who have experienced what he dangerously desires to experience. Now then, from his poem and from the letter I sent him, your most kind and gentle prudence will understand what I grieve over in him, what I fear, and what I desire. Nor do I despair that the Lord will be present, so that through you, his minister, I may be freed from such great surges of anxiety. Indeed, since you are going to read many of our writings, your love will be much more welcome to me if, in what displeases you, you correct me, a righteous man in mercy, and rebuke me. For you are not such that I need fear having my head anointed with your oil. The brothers, not only those who live with us and those who live wherever they may and serve God equally, but almost all who know us gladly in Christ, greet, revere and long for Your Brotherliness, Blessedness and Kindness. I do not dare to ask, but if you have leisure from church duties, you see what Africa thirsts for along with me.

Never has anyone become known to anyone by his face as well as the quiet joy and truly liberal exercise of your studies in the Lord has become known to me. Although, then, I greatly desire to know you altogether, I lack only a small part of you, namely the presence of your body. And even this, after our brother Alypius, now a most blessed bishop but then already worthy of the episcopate, saw you and on his return was seen by me, I cannot deny has been largely imprinted on me by his account; and even before his return, when he was seeing you there, I was seeing you, but with his eyes. For whoever knows us would say that he and I are two in body but not in mind, that is, in harmony and most faithful friendship, not in merits, in which he excels. Since, then, you love me first through the communion of the Spirit, by which we strive toward unity, and then from his mouth, I do not at all impudently, as though I were unknown, commend to Your Brotherliness our brother Profuturus, who we hope will truly be profitable, through our efforts and then through your help; unless perhaps he is such that I shall become more commended to you through him than he through me. Perhaps I ought to have written only so far, if I wished to be content with the manner of formal letters. But my mind overflows with things to share with you in conversation about our studies, which we have in Christ Jesus our Lord, who deigns to minister to us, even through your love, not a few benefits and provisions, as it were, for the journey he has shown us.

We ask, then, and the whole studious fellowship of the African churches asks with us, that you not be reluctant to spend care and labour on translating the books of those who have treated our Scriptures best in Greek. For you can bring it about that we too may have those men, and especially one whose name you sound most willingly in your writings. But I would not want you to labour at turning the holy canonical writings into the Latin tongue, except in the way you translated Job, so that by the addition of signs it may appear how this translation of yours differs from that of the Seventy, whose authority is the weightiest. I cannot wonder enough if anything is still found in the Hebrew copies that has escaped so many translators most skilled in that language. For I leave aside the Seventy, about whose harmony, whether of counsel or of spirit, greater than if they had been one man, I do not dare to give a definite opinion either way, except that I think pre-eminent authority must be granted to them in this task without dispute. Those move me more who translated later and, as is said, held more tenaciously to the way and rules of Hebrew words and expressions, yet not only did not agree among themselves but also left many things which remained to be dug out and published so long afterward. For if these things are obscure, it is believed that you too can be mistaken in them; if they are clear, it is not believed that those men could have been mistaken in them. I would implore you, then, of your love, to set out the reasons for this and make me certain.

I have also read some writings on the letters of the apostle Paul that were said to be yours. When you sought to explain the letter to the Galatians, you came to that passage in which the apostle Peter is called back from a ruinous pretence. There, I confess, I grieve not a little that the defence of a lie has been undertaken, whether by you, such a man as you are, or by someone else, if another wrote these things; and I shall grieve until the things that trouble me are refuted, if perhaps they can be refuted. For it seems to me most disastrous to believe that there is any lie in the holy books, that is, that the men through whom that Scripture was ministered and written down for us told any lie in their books. For it is one question whether it is ever the part of a good man to lie, and another whether it was proper for a writer of the holy Scriptures to lie; or rather, it is not another question but no question at all. For once some well-meant lie has been admitted into so lofty a height of authority, no little part of those books will remain which, whenever it seems to anyone either difficult for conduct or incredible for faith, will not be referred, by this same most ruinous rule, to the plan and purpose of a lying author.

For if the apostle Paul was lying when, rebuking the apostle Peter, he said, 'If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?', and if Peter seemed to him to have acted rightly, though he both said and wrote that he had not acted rightly, in order, as it were, to soothe the minds of those who were in an uproar, what shall we answer when perverse men arise forbidding marriage, as he himself foretold, and say that all that the same apostle said to confirm the right of marriage was a lie, told for the sake of people who might cause an uproar out of love for their wives, that is, not because he thought it, but to appease their opposition? There is no need to mention many things. For even in the praises of God there could seem to be well-meant lies, so that love for him may be kindled among lazier people. And so nowhere in the holy books will the authority of pure truth be certain. Do we not notice the same apostle, with great care to commend the truth, saying: 'If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is empty, and your faith is empty too. And we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we have testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise'? If someone said to him: 'Why do you shudder at this lie, when what you would have said, even if false, contributes greatly to the praise of God?', would he not, detesting this man's madness, open the depths of his heart to the light with whatever words and signs he could, crying out that to praise falsehood in God is no less a crime, perhaps even a greater one, than to blame truth? We must see to it, then, that the man who comes to the knowledge of the divine Scriptures thinks so holily and truthfully about the holy books that he does not wish to take delight in any part of them through well-meant lies, and would rather pass over what he does not understand than prefer his own heart to that truth. For surely, when he says this, he asks to be believed himself, and works to make us not believe the authorities of the divine Scriptures.

And I for my part, with whatever strength the Lord supplies, would show that all those testimonies which have been brought forward to establish the usefulness of lying must be understood otherwise, so that their firm truth may be taught everywhere. For just as testimonies ought not to be lies, so they ought not to favour lying. But this I leave to your understanding. For if you apply more careful consideration to the reading, you will perhaps see it much more easily than I. To this consideration you will be compelled by your piety, through which you recognize that the authority of the divine Scriptures becomes unsteady, so that in them each person believes what he wants and does not believe what he does not want, once it has been accepted that those men through whom these things were ministered to us could have told well-meant lies in their writings; unless perhaps you are going to give some rules by which we may know where it is proper to lie and where it is not. If this can be done, I ask you to explain it by no lying or doubtful reasons. And do not judge me burdensome or impudent, I beg you by the most truthful humanity of our Lord. For my error, if I err, favours truth with no fault, or certainly with no great fault, if in your case truth can rightly favour a lie. Many other things I would like to discuss with your most sincere heart, and to confer about Christian study, but no letter is enough for this desire of mine. I can do it more abundantly through the brother whom I rejoice to have sent to share and be nourished by your sweet and useful conversations. And yet even he, if I may say so with his leave, perhaps does not take in as much as I would wish. Though I would in no way prefer myself to him; for I confess that I am more capable of receiving you, but I see that he is becoming fuller, in which he undoubtedly surpasses me. And after he returns, which I hope with the Lord's help will turn out well, when I share in his heart filled by you, he will not fill what will still be empty in me and greedy for your thoughts. So it will happen that even then I shall be the needier and he the richer. This same brother is carrying with him some of our writings. If you deign to read them, I ask you to apply also a sincere and brotherly severity. For I do not understand otherwise what is written, 'The righteous man will correct me in mercy and rebuke me; but let not the oil of the sinner anoint my head', except that the one who rebukes and heals loves more than the flatterer who anoints the head. I find it very hard to read what I have written as a good judge; I am either more timid than is right or more eager. I see my faults too sometimes, but I prefer to hear them from better men, lest, when I have perhaps rightly blamed myself, I flatter myself again and seem to myself to have passed a fearful rather than a just sentence on myself.