Sermons to the People 348.1–350.3

I do not doubt, dearly beloved brothers, that the fear of God has been implanted in your hearts, by which you may be led to true and solid fortitude. For since he is called brave who fears no one, he is brave in a perverse way who does not first want to fear God, so that by fearing he may hear, by hearing love, and by loving not fear. Then he will be truly most brave, not by proud hardness but by secure justice. So too it is written: “The fear of the Lord is the hope of fortitude.” For when the punishment he threatens is feared, one learns to love the reward he promises: and so by fear of punishment a good life is kept; by a good life a good conscience is gained, so that by a good conscience no punishment is feared. Therefore let him who does not want to fear learn to fear. Let him who wants always to be secure learn to be anxious for a time. For as John says, “Fear is not in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” He said it, indeed, and said it truly. If, then, you do not want to have fear, first see whether you already have the perfect love that casts out fear. But if fear is excluded before this perfection, pride puffs up; love does not build up. For as in good health hunger is driven out not by loathing but by food, so in a good mind fear is to be driven out not by vanity but by love.

So examine your conscience, whoever no longer wants to fear. Do not feel over the surface; go down into yourself, get into the inner parts of your heart. Search carefully whether no poisoned vein there sucks and drinks up the wasting love of the world; whether you are moved and caught by no enticement of carnal pleasure, puffed up and lifted by no empty boasting, seething with no concern for vanity; whether you dare to declare that you see yourself pure and clear, in whatever hiding places you examine in your conscience, from deeds, words, and wicked thoughts; whether, if diligence in iniquity no longer wears you out, no negligence of equity creeps in. If this is so, you rightly rejoice; rejoice to be without fear. Then the love of God has excluded it, whom you love with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind. The love of your neighbour has excluded it too, whom you love as yourself: and so you busy yourself for him, that he too with you may love God with his whole heart, his whole soul, his whole mind; because you do not rightly love even yourself unless you love God in such a way that you do not love him less because you turn even to yourself. But if, although within yourself you are stirred by no desire (and who would dare to boast this of himself?), still you love yourself in yourself and are pleased with yourself, you ought to fear this very thing more vehemently, that you fear nothing. For fear is not to be cast out by any love whatever, but by the right love, by which we love God wholly, and the neighbour for his sake, so that he too may love God. But to love oneself in oneself and to please oneself is not the love of justice but the vanity of pride. And so the apostle struck with just reproof those who love themselves and please themselves. “Perfect love,” then, “casts out fear.” But that is to be called love which is not worthlessness. And what is more worthless than man without God? Look what he loves who loves himself not in God but in himself. To him it is rightly said, “Do not be high-minded, but fear.” For because he is high-minded and therefore does not fear, he surely does not fear to his ruin, since he is not set on solid ground but tossed by the breath of pride. Nor is he gentle and devout who loves and praises himself in himself: but, lifted up and fierce, he does not know how to say, “My soul will be praised in the Lord; let the meek hear and be glad.” For what good does he love who perhaps loves to fear nothing for its own sake? For he can persuade himself of this not by health but by brutality. For example, there is some most daring robber, the more perversely brave the more dangerously cruel, who because of that very love by which he loves to fear nothing undertakes enormous crimes, so as to exercise what he loves and strengthen it by exercise: the greater his crimes, the greater the boldness of the man who does not fear. So this is not to be loved as a great good, since it can be found even in the worst of men.

Therefore the philosophers of this world are to be laughed at, not only the Epicureans, who even hold justice itself for sale at the price of carnal pleasure. For they say that the wise man ought to be just for this reason, so as either to acquire or to keep pleasure from the body. For these too boast that they are very brave and say that they fear nothing at all: because they think that God does not care about human affairs at all, and they believe that when this life is used up there will be none afterwards; and if any adversity befalls them in this life, they consider themselves protected by this, that bodily pleasure, when they cannot hold it in the body itself, they can still think of in the mind, and by delighting themselves with that thought they keep the happiness of bodily pleasure even against the onslaught of bodily pain. Does not love with these people too cast out fear? But a love of the most sordid pleasure, or rather a love of the most shameful vanity. For when pain rushing in from the body's members has shut out that pleasure, it will remain in the mind by a false image of vanity. That vanity is so loved that, when the vain man embraces it with all the strength of his heart, even the cruelty of pain is softened. So not only these are to be laughed at, but the Stoics too. For these two sects of the Epicureans and Stoics, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, dared to puff out their smoke against the light of our Paul. For the Stoics too present themselves as very brave, and not for the sake of bodily pleasure but for the sake of the mind's virtue they maintain this very not-fearing for the sake of not-fearing, swollen with conceit, not healed by wisdom but hardened by error. They are the less and less healthy the more they have believed that a sick mind can be healed by themselves. For they think this is the health of the mind, that they say the wise man ought not even to feel pity. “For if he pities,” they say, “he grieves; and what grieves is not healthy.” O foolish blindness! What if it grieves the less because it is not healthy? For it makes a difference whether it does not grieve from perfect health—as will be the body and soul of the saints in the resurrection of the dead, which these do not believe, because they have unlearned teachers when they have themselves. It makes a difference, then, whether something does not grieve from health or from numbness. For according to the health of this mortality, healthy flesh grieves when we are pricked. Such too is the mind that is well disposed according to this life, which, pricked by the misery of one who suffers, grieves with him in compassion. But flesh numbed by a graver disease, or dead when the spirit too is lost, does not grieve even when it is pricked: such is the mind of those who philosophize without God, or rather are choked. For as the body lives when breathed into by the soul, so the soul itself lives when breathed into by God. Let those, then, who neither grieve nor fear see to it that they are not perhaps not healthy but dead.

But let the Christian fear, before perfect love casts out fear: let him believe and understand that he is a pilgrim away from the Lord as long as he lives in the body which is corrupted and weighs down the soul. Let fear be the less, the nearer the homeland to which we are heading. For fear ought to be greater in those on pilgrimage, less in those drawing near, none in those who arrive. So both fear leads to love, and perfect love casts out fear. But let the Christian fear, not those who kill the body and afterwards have nothing they can do, but him who has power to kill both body and soul in the hell of fire. But there is another fear of the Lord, chaste, abiding for ever and ever. This one, then, perfect love does not cast out; otherwise it would not abide for ever and ever. And not in vain, when it had been said, “The fear of the Lord,” was “chaste” added; and so it was joined to “abiding for ever and ever.” Why, except because that fear which love casts out pricks the soul lest something be lost that is loved in the creature, or bodily health and rest itself, or some such thing after death? For that is why the punishments in the underworld and the pains and torments of hell are feared. But when the soul takes care lest God, the deserted, desert it, that is the chaste fear abiding for ever and ever. Of this I would speak more broadly, did not the sermon, already rather long, force me to spare both my old man's strength and perhaps your having had your fill.

The apostle spoke to us about love a little while ago, when his Letter was read; and he so commended it to us that we should understand that all other things, however great gifts of God, profit nothing without it. But where it is, it cannot be alone. So let us too give your Charity a sermon on love. There is a love that is divine, and another that is human; and of human love one is lawful, another unlawful. Of these three loves, then—or affections; for what in Greek is called agapē has two names among the Latins—I shall speak as the Lord grants. This, then, is my first division, which I have stated: that one love is human and another divine; and that the human is divided in two, because one is lawful and another unlawful. First, then, I speak of lawful human love, which is not blamed; then of unlawful human love, which is condemned; third, of the divine, which leads us to the kingdom.

To put it briefly, then: lawful is the human love by which a wife is loved; unlawful, that by which a prostitute or another man's wife is loved. For in the forum and the streets lawful love is held in higher regard than a prostitute; in the house of God, in the temple of God, in the city of Christ, in the body of Christ, even love of a prostitute leads the lover to hell. Have, then, lawful love: it is human, but, as I said, it is lawful. And it is not only lawful in the sense of being allowed, but lawful in the sense that if it is lacking it is blamed. Be it lawful for you with human love to love your wives, to love your children, to love your friends, to love your fellow citizens. For all these names carry the bond of kinship and, in a way, the glue of love. But you see that this love can belong also to the ungodly, that is, to pagans, Jews, heretics. For which of them does not love wife, children, brothers, neighbours, in-laws, friends, and so on? This, then, is human. If, then, anyone is carried away by such cruelty as to lose even the human affection of love, and does not love his children and does not love his wife, he is not even to be counted among human beings. For he who loves his children is not to be praised; but he who does not love his children is to be condemned. For let him also see with whom this love must be shared by him. Even wild beasts love their young: asps love their young, tigers love their young, lions love their young. For there is no beast that does not murmur tenderly to its young. For though it frightens men, it cherishes its little ones. The lion roars in the woods so that no one passes; it goes into the cave where it has its young and puts off all the rage of its savagery. It lays it down outside; it does not take it in. So whoever does not love his children is worse even than a lion. These things are human, and they are lawful.

Beware of unlawful love. You are members of Christ, and you are the body of Christ. Hear the apostle, and be afraid. For he could not have spoken more gravely, more forcefully, he could not have deterred Christians more sharply from love of fornication than where he said: “Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?” To say this, he says above: “Do you not know that whoever clings to a prostitute becomes one body?” And he gave a testimony from Scripture, what is written: “The two will be in one flesh.” For this was said by God, but of husband and wife, where it is lawful, where it is permitted, where it is honourable; not where it is shameful, not where it is unlawful, not where it is in every way damnable. But just as one flesh comes about in the lawful union of husband and wife, so one flesh comes about in the unlawful union of a prostitute and her lover. Since, then, one flesh comes about, let that terrify you, let that make you shudder which he added: “Shall I then take the members of Christ?” Attend to the members of Christ, Christian; do not attend to the members of Christ in another; in yourself attend to the members of Christ, you who were bought with the blood of Christ. “Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?” Whoever does not shudder at this, God shudders at him.

Indeed, indeed, I beg you, my brothers: look, let us suppose what is not so, that God had promised impunity to such people and said, “Those who do such things I will pity, I will not condemn them.” Let us suppose God had said this. Even with impunity promised, does anyone take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? He does not, if the third, divine love is there. For I mentioned three loves; I promised to speak of three, as the Lord gave: of lawful human, of unlawful human, and of that excellent and divine one. Let us question divine love, and set before it the two human loves, and say to it: “Look, the lawful human love, by which a wife is loved, and daughters and other worldly ties; look, the other, unlawful, by which a prostitute is loved, by which another man's maidservant is loved, by which another man's daughter is loved who has not been asked for nor promised, by which another man's wife is loved. There are two loves before you: with which of these do you want to stay?” Whoever chooses to stay with the lawful human love does not stay with the unlawful human love. Let no one say to himself, “I have both.” If you have both, by admitting to yourself love of a prostitute, you do wrong as it were to the matron who dwells there, divine love. For I think that if you are a married man and love a prostitute, you do not bring the prostitute into your house to live with your matron. You do not go that far. You seek darkness, you seek hiding places; you do not profess your shameful act. But those too who have no wives and are, as it were, more freely lovers of prostitutes (I said “as it were,” because they too are condemned, if they are now baptized): I think that even a young man who does not yet have a wife, if he loves a prostitute, does not make her live with his sister, does not make her live with his mother, so as not to do wrong to human modesty, not to offend the honour of his blood. If, then, you do not make the prostitute you love live with your mother, with your sister, so as not, as I said, to offend the honour of your blood, do you make the love of a prostitute live in your heart with the love of God, and offend the honour of the blood of Christ?

Love God; you find nothing better. You love silver because it is better than iron and bronze; you love gold more, because it is better than silver; you love precious stones more, because they surpass even the price of gold; you love, lastly, this light, which everyone who fears death dreads to leave; you love, I say, this light, as he longed for it with a kind of enormous love who cried after Jesus, “Have mercy on me, son of David.” The blind man cried out as Christ passed by. For he feared that he would pass by and not heal him. And how much did he cry? So much that he was not silent though the crowd forbade him. He overcame the one who opposed him; he held on to the Saviour. While the crowds made a din and forbade him to cry out, Jesus stood still, called him, and said to him, “What do you want done for you?” “Lord,” he said, “that I may see.” “Look up, your faith has saved you.” Love Christ; long for the light which is Christ. If he longed for the light of the body, how much more ought you to long for the light of the heart? Let us cry out to him not with voices but with conduct. Let us live well, let us despise the world: let everything that passes be nothing to us. When we live so, worldly men will rebuke us as if they loved us, men who love the earth, who savour dust, who draw nothing from heaven, who take in the free air with the nose and not the heart: they will rebuke us beyond doubt and will say, if they see us despising these human, these earthly things: “What is the matter with you? Are you mad?” That is the crowd opposing, so that the blind man may not cry out. And there are some Christians who forbid living as a Christian: because that crowd too walked with Christ, and kept the man shouting to Christ and longing for the light from the kindness of Christ himself. There are such Christians: but let us overcome them, let us live well; and let our very life be our voice to Christ. He will stand still, because he does stand.

For there too is a great mystery. He was passing by when the man cried out; when he healed him, he stood still. Let Christ's passing by make us intent on crying out. What is Christ's passing by? Whatever he endured for us in time is his passing by. He was born, he passed on: is he still being born? He grew, he passed on: is he still growing? He sucked the breast: does he still suck? Tired, he slept: does he still sleep? He ate and drank: does he still do so? Lastly, he was seized, bound, scourged, crowned with thorns, struck with slaps, smeared with spittle, hung on the wood, killed, pierced with the lance, buried, rose again: he is still passing by. He ascended into heaven, he sits at the right hand of the Father: he stood still. Cry out as much as you can: now he gives you light. For in that he was the Word with God, he certainly stood, because he did not change. “And the Word was God”: “and the Word became flesh.” The flesh, by passing, did many things and suffered: the Word stood still. By the Word itself the heart is enlightened; because by the Word itself the flesh that he took up is honoured. Take away the Word: what is the flesh? The same as yours. But so that Christ's flesh might be honoured, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Let us cry out, then, and live well.

Love your children, love your wives, even in a worldly way. For you ought to love them according to Christ, so as to provide for them according to God, and to love nothing in them but Christ, and to hate it in your own if they refuse to have Christ. For that is the divine love. For what will your passing and mortal love profit them? Yet when you love in a human way too, love Christ more. I do not say that you should not love your wife; but love Christ more. I do not say that you should not love your father, I do not say that you should not love your children; but love Christ more. Hear him saying it, lest you think these words are mine: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” When you hear, “is not worthy of me,” do you not fear? The one of whom Christ says, “He is not worthy of me,” is not with him: where will the one be who will not be with him? If you do not love to be with him, fear to be without him. Why fear to be without him? Because you will be with the devil if you are not with Christ. And where will the devil be? Hear Christ himself: “Go into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.” If you are not set on fire by the fire of heaven, fear the fire of hell. If you do not love to be among the angels of God, fear to be among the angels of the devil. If you do not love to be in the kingdom, fear to be in the furnace of burning fire, unquenchable, everlasting. Let fear first win in you, and there will be love. Let fear be the slave who leads the child to school: let it not remain in you itself, but lead you to love as to the teacher.

My brothers, the manifold abundance and the very broad teaching of the divine Scriptures are grasped without any error and kept without any toil by the one whose heart is full of love; as the apostle says, “Love is the fullness of the law”; and in another place, “The end of the commandment is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and unfeigned faith.” What is the end of the commandment except the fulfilment of the commandment? And what is the fulfilment of the commandment except the fullness of the law? So what he said there, “Love is the fullness of the law,” he said here too: “The end of the commandment is love.” Nor can there be any doubt that a man in whom love dwells is a temple of God. For John too says, “God is love.” But the apostles, in saying these things and commending to us the excellence of love, could surely belch out nothing but what they had eaten. For the Lord himself, feeding them with the word of truth, the word of love, which is himself the living bread that came down from heaven, said, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another”; and again, “By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” For he who came through the mockery of the cross to destroy the corruption of the flesh, and by the newness of his death to dissolve the oldness of the bond of our death, made a new man by a new commandment. For it was an old thing that man should die. So that this should not always prevail in man, a new thing was done, that God should die. But because he died in the flesh, not in the divinity, through the everlasting life of the divinity he did not allow the destruction of the flesh to be everlasting. So, as the apostle says, “He died for our sins, and rose for our justification.” He, then, who brought newness of life against the oldness of death sets the new commandment against the old sin. Therefore, whoever you are who want to extinguish the old sin, extinguish desire by the new commandment, and embrace love. For as desire is the root of all evils, so love is the root of all goods.

The love by which we love God and neighbour securely possesses the whole greatness and breadth of the divine words. For the one heavenly Teacher teaches us and says: “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and with your whole soul, and with your whole mind; and you shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law and the Prophets.” If, then, you have no time to search all the holy pages, to unroll all the wrappings of the words, to penetrate all the secrets of the Scriptures, hold on to love, on which all things hang: so you will hold what you have learned there; you will hold also what you have not yet learned. For if you know love, you know something on which hangs also what perhaps you do not know: and in what you understand in the Scriptures, love is open; in what you do not understand, love is hidden. So he holds both what is open and what is hidden in the divine words who holds love in his conduct.

Therefore, brothers, pursue love, the sweet and healthful bond of minds, without which the rich man is poor and with which the poor man is rich. It is enduring in adversity, temperate in prosperity; brave in hard sufferings, cheerful in good works; most secure in temptation, most generous in hospitality; most joyful among true brothers, most patient among false ones. In Abel it was pleasing through sacrifice, in Noah secure through the flood, most faithful in Abraham's journeyings, most gentle in Moses amid insults, most mild in David's troubles. In the three young men it awaits gentle fires innocently; in the Maccabees it bravely endures savage fires. It is chaste in Susanna towards her husband, in Anna after her husband, in Mary apart from a husband. It is free in Paul to rebuke, humble in Peter to obey; human in Christians to confess, divine in Christ to pardon. But what greater or richer thing can I say about love than the praises the Lord thunders of it through the mouth of the apostle, as he shows the more excellent way and says: “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give away all my means, and if I distribute all I have to the poor, and if I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. Love is magnanimous, love is kind. Love is not jealous, does not act wrongly, is not puffed up, is not dishonourable, does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not think evil, does not rejoice over iniquity, but rejoices with the truth. It tolerates all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never falls.” How great it is! The soul of the letters, the power of prophecy, the saving force of the sacraments, the foundation of knowledge, the fruit of faith, the riches of the poor, the life of the dying. What is so magnanimous as to die for the ungodly? What is so kind as to love enemies? It alone is not oppressed by another's happiness, because it is not jealous. It alone is not lifted up by its own happiness, because it is not puffed up. It alone is not pricked by a bad conscience, because it does not act wrongly. Amid insults it is secure, amid hatreds it does good; amid anger it is calm, amid plots innocent; amid iniquities it groans, in truth it breathes freely. What is stronger than it, not for repaying injuries but for not minding them? What is more faithful than it, not to vanity but to eternity? For it tolerates all things in the present life because it believes all things about the future life; and it endures all things that are inflicted here because it hopes all things that are promised there: rightly it never falls. Pursue love, then, and, thinking on it in holiness, bring forth the fruits of justice. And whatever richer things than I have been able to say you may find in its praises, let them appear in your conduct. For an old man's sermon ought to be not only weighty but also brief.