Letters 80.1–82.17

When our dearest brother Celsus asked for a reply, I hastened to pay my debt, and truly I hastened; for while I thought he would stay with us some days longer, suddenly, having found an opportunity of a ship, he told me late at night that he was leaving the next day. What could I do, since I could not keep him, and, since he was hurrying to you, with whom he would be better off, I ought not to have done so even if I could? So I at once seized on these few words to dictate and send, confessing myself a debtor of a longer letter, when, after the return of our venerable brothers and colleagues Theasius and Evodius, I have first been satisfied with news of you. For we hope at any moment, in the name and with the help of Christ, that you will come to us more fully in their hearts and on their lips. When I was writing this, I had already given another letter a few days before to our like-minded son Fortunatianus, a presbyter of the church of Thagaste, who was about to sail to Rome. Now, then, as I am accustomed, I ask that you do as you are accustomed: pray for us, that the Lord may look on our humility and our toil and forgive all our sins.

I long, if you will deign, to converse with you by letter about such things as we could converse about if we were present to your perceptions. Here, then, is that little question I recently put to you, as if I were raising it face to face amid sweet conversation. You solved it plainly with Christian understanding and devotion, but too hastily and briefly. The grace of your speech might have dwelt on it somewhat longer and more fully if, when you had said that you had resolved to remain in the place you enjoy so happily, in such a way that, if the Lord should be pleased with anything else concerning you, you would prefer his will to yours, you had explained somewhat more clearly how we may know the will of God, which is to be put before our will. Is it only in a matter which we ought to bear willingly because we would be forced to bear it even against our will? For there indeed something happens that we do not wish, but we correct ourselves so as to wish it, because he wills it whose will it is not right to refuse in its excellence nor possible to escape in its omnipotence; as another girded Peter and carried him where he did not wish to go, yet he went where he would not, but, though unwilling, submitted to a harsh death. Or is it also where it is in our power not to change our decision, though something else presents itself, in which the will of God appears rather to be calling us to change our decision, not because ours was bad, but because it was one in which we would rightly remain unless he called us to another? For it was not evil for Abraham to rear and bring up his son as long as he could, as far as lay in him, to the end of his life; but, suddenly commanded to kill him, he changed a decision which was certainly not bad before, but which would have been bad if it had not been changed after the command. Here too I do not doubt that you think nothing else.

But often it is not by a voice from heaven, nor through a prophet, nor through a revelation either in a dream or in a transport of the mind, which is called ecstasy, but by events themselves that happen and call us to something other than we had resolved, that we are forced to recognize that God’s will is other than ours: as if we had resolved to set out, and something arose which the truth, when consulted about our duty, forbade us to abandon; or, when we had decided to stay, something was reported which, when the same truth was consulted, compelled us to set out. I ask you to discuss with me more fully and clearly what you think about this third kind of reason for changing one’s decision. For it often troubles us, and it is hard not to neglect something that ought rather to be done while we are unwilling to change what we had first resolved to keep to, which is not evil in itself, but becomes evil because what ought rather to be done, when it presents itself, is abandoned; whereas if it did not present itself, one would persist in the former course not only without blame but even with praise. Here it is hard not to be deceived; here the prophetic word fully applies: ‘Who understands his faults?’ Here, I pray you, make me a sharer in your thoughts, what you are accustomed to do in such cases, or what you find ought to be done.

When I anxiously asked our holy brother Firmus how you were, I was glad to hear that you were well. Again, when I was not merely hoping for but demanding a letter from you, he said he had set out from Africa without your knowledge. So I send you my respectful greetings by him, who embraces you with singular love; and at the same time I beseech you to pardon my sense of shame, in that I could not refuse you when you had long been bidding me to reply. And it was not I who answered you, but cause answered cause. And if it is a fault to have answered (I ask you to hear me patiently), it is a much greater one to have provoked. But away with complaints of this kind; let there be pure brotherhood between us, and from now on let us send each other letters not of questions but of love. The holy brothers who serve the Lord with us greet you warmly. I pray you to greet with my respects the saints who bear Christ’s light yoke with you, especially the holy and venerable Pope Alypius. May Christ our God almighty keep you safe and mindful of me, my lord truly holy and most blessed pope. If you have read the book of explanations on Jonah, I think you will not take up the ridiculous question of the gourd. But if the friend who first attacked me with the sword has been repelled with the pen, let it befit your kindness and justice to rebuke the accuser, not the one who answers. Let us play, if you please, in the field of the Scriptures without hurting each other.

Some time ago I sent your Charity a long letter in answer to the one which you remember sending me by your holy son Asterius, now not only my brother but also my colleague. Whether it has been fortunate enough to reach your hands I do not yet know, except that you write by our most sincere brother Firmus that, if he who first attacked you with the sword has been repelled with the pen, it should befit my kindness and justice to rebuke the accuser, not the one who answers. From this single, very slight indication I somehow conjecture that you have read that letter of mine. For in it I lamented that so great a discord had arisen between you two, whose great friendship, spread abroad by report in every direction, had been a joy to brotherly love. I did this, not to rebuke your Brotherliness, in whom I would not dare to say I had recognized any fault in that matter, but to lament human misery, in which, however great the mutual love by which friendships are held, their lasting is uncertain. But I would rather have learned from your reply whether you have granted me the pardon I asked. I wish this to be made known to me more plainly, although a certain more cheerful look in your letter seems to indicate that I have obtained this too; if, that is, it was sent after you had read mine, which does not at all appear from it.

You ask, or rather, in the confidence of love, you bid, that we play in the field of the Scriptures without hurting each other. For my part, I would rather we treated these things seriously than in play. If you chose to use this word for the sake of ease, I confess that I seek something greater from the kindness of your powers and from your prudence, so learned and so leisured, so long-practised, studious, and gifted, a diligence to which the Holy Spirit not only grants these things but even dictates them, namely that in great and laborious questions you should help me, not as one playing in the field of the Scriptures, but as one panting among its mountains. But if you thought you should say ‘let us play’ because of the cheerfulness that befits dear friends in discussion, whether the matter we are discussing is open and plain or steep and difficult, teach me this, I beseech you: how can we manage, when something perhaps troubles us that we have not found convincing (because, if not through less care in attending, at least through slower understanding), and we try to maintain what seems to us to the contrary, that, if we say it with somewhat greater freedom, we do not fall under suspicion of childish boastfulness, as if we were seeking fame for our own name by accusing illustrious men; and, if we wrap in gentler language something harsh brought out by the necessity of refutation, so as to make it bearable, we are not judged to draw a sword smeared with honey? Unless perhaps the way to avoid both this fault and the suspicion of it is to argue with a more learned friend in such a way that we must approve whatever he says, and may not resist even a little, if only for the sake of inquiry.

Then indeed one plays without any fear of offence, as in a field; but it would be strange if we were not being played with. For I confess to your Charity that I have learned to give this fear and honour only to those books of the Scriptures which are now called canonical, so that I believe most firmly that none of their authors erred in anything in writing. And if I come upon anything in those writings that seems contrary to the truth, I do not doubt that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not grasped what was said, or I have not understood it at all. But others I read in such a way that, however much they excel in holiness and learning, I do not think a thing true because they thought so, but because they have been able to persuade me, either through those canonical authors or by probable reason, that it does not depart from the truth. Nor do I think, my brother, that you think otherwise; I do not suppose, I say, that you wish your books to be read like those of the prophets or apostles, of whose writings it is wicked to doubt that they are free of all error. Far be this from your devout humility and your truthful estimate of yourself; for if you were not endowed with it, you certainly would not say, ‘Would that we were worthy of your embrace, and that by talking together we might either teach or learn something.’

If, considering your life and character, I believe that you said this of yourself without pretence and without deceit, how much more just is it for me to believe that the apostle Paul did not mean anything other than he wrote where he says of Peter and Barnabas: ‘When I saw that they were not walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all, “If you, being a Jew, live as the Gentiles do and not as the Jews, how do you compel the Gentiles to live as Jews?”’ For of whom could I be sure that he does not deceive me in writing or speaking, if the apostle was deceiving his sons, with whom he was again in labour until Christ, that is, the truth, should be formed in them? Having said to them beforehand, ‘Now in what I write to you, behold, before God, I do not lie,’ was he nonetheless not writing truthfully, but deceiving them by some pretence of arrangement or other, when he said that he had seen Peter and Barnabas not walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, and had withstood Peter to his face for no other reason than that he was compelling the Gentiles to live as Jews?

‘But it is better to believe that the apostle Paul wrote something untrue than that the apostle Peter did something wrong.’ If this is so, let us say (God forbid!) that it is better to believe that the Gospel lies than that Christ was denied by Peter, and that the book of Kingdoms lies rather than that so great a prophet, so excellently chosen by the Lord God, committed adultery in desiring and taking away another man’s wife, and so horrible a murder in killing her husband. No, rather I will read the holy Scripture, set on the highest and heavenly summit of authority, certain and secure of its truth, and in it I will learn truthfully of men approved, corrected, or condemned, rather than, while I fear to believe that human deeds are sometimes blameworthy in certain persons of praiseworthy excellence, have the divine words themselves everywhere suspect.

The Manichaeans maintain that very many passages of the divine Scriptures, by which their wicked error is refuted with the clearest plainness of meaning, are false, because they cannot twist them into another sense; yet they attribute this falsity not to the apostles who wrote but to some corrupters of the manuscripts or other. But since they have never been able to prove this either from more numerous or older copies or from the authority of the original language from which the Latin books were translated, they go away overcome and confounded by the truth, which is well known to all. Does not your holy Prudence understand, then, how great an opening is given to their malice if we say, not that the apostolic writings were falsified by others, but that the apostles themselves wrote falsehoods?

‘It is not credible,’ you say, ‘that Paul censured in Peter what Paul himself had done.’ I am not now asking what he did; I am asking what he wrote. This is what most concerns the question I have taken up: that the truth of the divine Scriptures, committed to memory for the building up of our faith, not by just anyone but by the apostles themselves, and therefore received into the canonical summit of authority, should remain in every part truthful and beyond doubt. For if Peter did what he ought to have done, Paul lied in saying that he had seen him not walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel. For whoever does what he ought to do certainly does right; and therefore he says what is false about him who says that he did not do right, when he knows he did what he ought to have done. But if Paul wrote the truth, it is true that Peter was not then walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel; he was therefore doing what he ought not to have done. And if Paul himself had already done something of the kind, I would rather believe that he too had been corrected and could not neglect to correct his fellow apostle, than that he set down anything falsely in his letter, in any letter at all, and how much more in that one in which he said beforehand, ‘Now in what I write to you, behold, before God, I do not lie.’

I, for my part, believe that Peter acted in such a way as to compel the Gentiles to live as Jews. For I read that Paul wrote this, and I do not believe that he lied. And therefore Peter was not acting rightly in this; for it was contrary to the truth of the gospel that those who believed in Christ should think that they could not be saved without those old sacraments. For this is what those who had believed from the circumcision were contending at Antioch, against whom Paul fought persistently and fiercely. But Paul himself did not do what he did, whether in circumcising Timothy, or in fulfilling a vow at Cenchreae, or in undertaking at Jerusalem, at James’s advice, to celebrate those legal rites with those who had made a vow, in order that it might be thought that Christian salvation too was given through those sacraments, but so that he might not be believed to condemn, like the idolatry of the Gentiles, those things which God had commanded to be done in the former times, as was fitting, as shadows of things to come. For this is what James told him had been heard about him, that he taught separation from Moses; which is certainly wicked, that those who believe in Christ should be separated from Christ’s prophet, as if detesting and condemning the teaching of him of whom Christ himself says, ‘If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me.’

For notice, I beseech you, the very words of James: ‘You see, brother,’ he says, ‘how many thousands there are in Judea who have believed in Christ, and they are all zealous for the law. And they have heard about you, that you teach the Jews who are among the Gentiles separation from Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their children nor walk according to the custom. What then? The multitude must certainly come together, for they will hear that you have come. Do therefore what we tell you. We have four men who have a vow on them; take them, purify yourself with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that what they have heard about you is false, but that you yourself also follow, keeping the law. But as for the Gentiles who have believed, we have written, judging that they should observe nothing of the kind, except that they keep themselves from what is sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from sexual immorality.’ It is not obscure, I think, that James gave this advice so that those who, though they had believed in Christ from among the Jews, were still zealous for the law, might know that what they had heard about Paul was false, lest they should think that through the teaching of Christ the things ministered to the fathers through Moses were condemned as sacrilegious and not written at God’s command. For this charge had been spread about Paul not by those who understood in what spirit these things ought then to be observed by believing Jews, namely to commend the divine authority and the prophetic holiness of those sacraments, not to obtain salvation, which was now revealed in Christ and ministered through the sacrament of baptism; but by those who wished them to be observed as if without them there could be no salvation for believers in the gospel. For they had found him a most vehement preacher of grace, teaching, most contrary to their aim, that a man is justified not by those things but by the grace of Jesus Christ, to foretell which those shadows were commanded in the law. And therefore, striving to stir up hatred and persecution against him, they accused him as an enemy of the law and of the divine commandments; and he could not more fittingly avoid the odium of this false accusation than by himself celebrating the things he was thought to condemn as sacrilegious, and so showing that neither were the Jews then to be forbidden them as wicked, nor the Gentiles to be compelled to them as necessary.

For if he really disapproved of them as had been heard of him, and undertook to celebrate them in order to hide his opinion by a pretended action, James would not have said to him, ‘And all will know,’ but, ‘And all will think that what they have heard about you is false’; especially since at Jerusalem itself the apostles had already decreed that no one should compel the Gentiles to live as Jews, but had not decreed that no one should then forbid the Jews to live as Jews, although Christian teaching no longer compelled even them. Accordingly, if after this decree of the apostles Peter engaged in that pretence at Antioch by which he compelled the Gentiles to live as Jews, though he himself was not compelled to, although he was not forbidden to, for the sake of commending the oracles of God which were entrusted to the Jews, what wonder is it if Paul pressed him to assert freely what he remembered he had decreed with the other apostles at Jerusalem?

But if, as I rather think, Peter did this before that council at Jerusalem, even so it is no wonder that Paul wished him not to cover timidly but to assert confidently what he already knew Peter held equally with him, whether because he had conferred with him about the gospel, or because he knew that Peter had been divinely admonished on this matter at the calling of the centurion Cornelius, or because he had seen him eating with the Gentiles before those whom he feared came to Antioch. For we do not deny that Peter already held the same opinion as Paul. So Paul was not then teaching him what was true in this matter, but was censuring his pretence, by which the Gentiles were being compelled to live as Jews, for no other reason than that all those pretended actions were being done as if what was said by those was true who thought that believers could not be saved without circumcision of the foreskin and the other observances that were shadows of things to come.

So he circumcised Timothy for this reason, that it might not seem to the Jews, and especially to his mother’s kin, that those who had believed in Christ from the Gentiles detested circumcision as idolatry is to be detested, since God commanded the one and Satan prompted the other. And he did not circumcise Titus for this reason, that he might not give an opening to those who said that believers could not be saved without that circumcision, and who, to deceive the Gentiles, boasted that Paul too held this. He indicates this clearly enough where he says: ‘But not even Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised, because of false brethren secretly brought in, who had slipped in to spy out our liberty, that they might bring us into bondage; to whom we did not yield in subjection even for an hour, that the truth of the gospel might remain with you.’ Here it appears what he understood them to be angling for, so that he did not do what he had done in the case of Timothy, which he could do in that liberty by which he showed that those sacraments ought neither to be sought as necessary nor condemned as sacrilegious.

But in this discussion, you say, we must take care not to say, like the philosophers, that some human acts are intermediate between right action and sin, to be counted neither among right actions nor among sins; and we are pressed by the argument that to observe the ceremonies of the law cannot be indifferent, but is either good or evil, so that, if we call it good, we too are compelled to observe them, and if evil, we must believe that the apostles observed them not truly but in pretence. For my part, I fear for the apostles not so much the example of the philosophers, since they too say something true in their discussions, as that of advocates in the courts, when they lie in pleading the cases of others. If a comparison with these was thought fitting to introduce, in the very exposition of the Letter to the Galatians, to support the pretence of Peter and Paul, why should I fear before you the name of the philosophers, who are not foolish because everything they say is false, but because they trust in many falsehoods, and, where they are found to say true things, they are strangers to the grace of Christ, who is the Truth itself?

Why should I not say that those precepts of the old sacraments are neither good, since men are not justified by them (for they are shadows foretelling the grace by which we are justified), nor yet evil, since they were divinely commanded as suited to their time and persons, when the prophetic saying also helps me, in which God says that he gave that people precepts that were not good? For perhaps he did not say ‘evil’ but only ‘not good’ for this reason, that is, not such that men become good by them, or do not become good without them. I would like your kind sincerity to teach me whether any holy man from the East, when he comes to Rome, fasts on the sabbath in pretence, except on that day of the Easter vigil. If we call this evil, we shall condemn not only the Roman church but also many churches near it and some further away, where the same custom is kept and continues. But if we think it evil not to fast on the sabbath, with what rashness shall we accuse so many churches of the East and the much greater part of the Christian world! Do you agree that we should call it something intermediate, which is nevertheless acceptable to one who does it not in pretence but out of fitting fellowship and observance? And yet we read nothing in the canonical books commanding Christians on this point. How much less do I dare to call evil what I cannot deny God commanded, by that very Christian faith by which I learned that I am justified not by it but by the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

I say, then, that circumcision of the foreskin and other things of this kind were divinely given to the former people through the covenant called old, to signify things to come which were to be fulfilled through Christ; that when these came, those things remained for Christians only to be read for the understanding of the prophecy that went before, not necessarily to be done, as if we still had to wait for the coming of the revelation of faith which they signified would come. But although they were not to be imposed on the Gentiles, they ought not, for all that, to have been taken away from the custom of the Jews as if they were to be detested and condemned. Gradually, therefore, and little by little, while the preaching of the grace of Christ was indeed glowing hot, by which alone believers were to know that they are justified and saved, and not by those shadows of things formerly to come and now coming and present, so that in the calling of those Jews whom the bodily presence of the Lord and the apostolic times found in that state, the whole practice of the shadows might be used up, it was enough for its commendation that it should not be shunned as detestable and like idolatry; but it should go no further, lest it be thought necessary, as if salvation came from it or could not be without it. This the heretics thought, who, wishing to be both Jews and Christians, could be neither Jews nor Christians. You were kind enough most benevolently to warn me to beware of their opinion, though I was never in it. Into this opinion Peter had fallen, not by agreement but by pretence out of fear, so that Paul wrote most truly of him that he had seen him not walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, and said to him most truly that he was compelling the Gentiles to live as Jews. Paul certainly did not compel them, for he observed those old things truthfully where there was need, so as to show that they were not to be condemned, yet preached insistently that the faithful are saved not by them but by the revealed grace of faith, so that he might not compel anyone to undertake them as necessary. Thus I believe that the apostle Paul did all those things truthfully, and yet now I neither compel nor allow anyone who has become a Christian from among the Jews to celebrate such things truthfully, just as you, who think that Paul pretended them, neither compel nor allow such a person to pretend them.

Or do you wish me too to say that this is the sum of the question, or rather of your opinion: that after the gospel of Christ the believing Jews do well if they offer the sacrifices which Paul offered, if they circumcise their sons, if they keep the sabbath, as Paul did in the case of Timothy and as all the Jews observed, provided only that they do these things in pretence and deceitfully? If this is so, we slide no longer into the heresy of Ebion, or of those commonly called Nazarenes, or into any other old heresy, but into some new one, which is the more pernicious in that it comes not from error but from deliberate and deceitful will. But if, to clear yourself of this opinion, you answer that the apostles then commendably pretended these things so that the weak, many of whom had believed from among the Jews and did not yet understand that these things were to be rejected, should not be offended, but that now, when the doctrine of Christian grace has been established through so many nations, and when the reading of the law and the prophets has also been established through all the churches of Christ, showing how these things are read to be understood, not to be observed, whoever wishes to do them in pretence is mad, why may I not say that the apostle Paul and other Christians of right faith ought then to have commended those old sacraments truthfully by observing them for a little while, lest those observances of prophetic significance, kept by most godly fathers, should be thought to be detested by their descendants as diabolical sacrileges? For once the faith had come, which, foretold beforehand by those observances, was revealed after the death and resurrection of the Lord, they had lost, as it were, the life of their function. Yet just as the dead bodies of kinsfolk had in some way to be escorted to burial, not in pretence but religiously, and not abandoned at once or thrown to the slanders of enemies as to the bites of dogs, so now any Christian, even one from among the Jews, who wishes to celebrate them in the same way, will be, as it were, stirring up ashes laid to rest, not a devout escort or bearer of the body but an impious violator of the tomb.

I confess, indeed, that in what my letter contains, namely that Paul had undertaken to celebrate the sacraments of the Jews when he was already an apostle of Christ in order to teach that they were not harmful to those who wished to keep them as they had received them from their parents through the law, I did not add ‘only at that time when the grace of faith was first revealed’; for then this was not harmful. But in the course of time those observances were to be abandoned by all Christians, lest, if this had been done at that time, what God commanded his people through Moses should not be distinguished from what the unclean spirit instituted in the temples of demons. Therefore my negligence in not adding this is to be blamed rather than your rebuke. Yet long before I received your letter, when writing against Faustus the Manichaean, I explained the same passage, though briefly, and did not omit this point there; your Kindness can read it if you do not disdain to, and you may be assured, in whatever way you wish, by our dearest brothers through whom I have now sent these writings, that I dictated it earlier. And believe me about my own mind, which, speaking before God, I ask by the right of love: it has never seemed to me that even now Christians who have become so from among the Jews ought to celebrate those old sacraments with any feeling or in any spirit, or that it is in any way lawful for them, since I have always thought so about Paul from the time his letters became known to me; just as you do not think that anyone should pretend these things at this time, though you believe the apostles did so.