Letters 289–301

Without address, concerning a woman who was being harassed. Judging it an equal sin to leave sinners unpunished and to exceed due measure in punishment, I inflicted on this man the penalty that fell to me, excluding him from ecclesiastical communion; and I advised those who had been wronged not to avenge themselves, but to leave the recompense to the Lord. So, if our injunctions were of any use, I would have been heard then, when I used speech far more persuasive than a letter could be. But since I heard words of great weight, I kept quiet then, and now I do not think it fitting for me to discuss the same matters. "For I," she says, "despised a husband, and childbearing, and the life of the world, to obtain this one thing: approval from God and a better reputation among men. Since a man reared from boyhood in the ruin of households, forcing his way in with his usual shamelessness, once broke into our house and became known to us only as far as a bare acquaintance, and since, through ignorance of his character and a certain untutored modesty, I was ashamed to drive him away openly, he went to such a pitch of impiety and insolence as to fill the whole city with blasphemies against me, and to denounce me by a public placard posted on the doors of the church. For this he met with some indignation from the laws; but he came back again and renewed his blasphemies. Again the market, the gymnasia, the theaters, and the houses of those who receive him because of the likeness of their life, are full of abuse of me. And it fell to me to be known not for better things, in which it would have been fitting, but for the most shameful, because his licentious mind made me notorious to all. At this," she says, "some delight in the blasphemies, because men naturally rejoice in abuse; others say they are vexed, but do not grieve with me; others are persuaded that the abuse is true; others are in doubt, attending to the multitude of his oaths. And there is no one who grieves with me. Now truly I perceive my desolation, and I lament myself, since I have no brother, no friend, no kinsman, no slave, no free man, no human being at all who grieves with me; and, as it seems, I alone am more pitiable than the city, in which there is such a lack of haters of evil, men who do not think that drunken violence goes round in a circle and will some day overtake them too." Having gone through these things, and many more striking ones, with untold tears before me, she went away, not even leaving me free of reproaches, because, when I ought to grieve with her as a father, I am indifferent to so great an evil and philosophize about others' misfortunes. … she could despise the loss of money and bear bodily toils; but she has been harmed in her very reputation, the damage to which becomes a common loss to the clergy. After these words, what do you want me to say to her now, my admirable friend, since I myself hold this judgment: not to hand offenders over to the authorities, and yet not to rescue them when they have been handed over? For these the Apostle long ago declared that they should fear the ruler for an evil deed; "For he does not bear the sword in vain," he says. As, then, handing over is not humane, so rescuing them is nourishing their drunken violence. Perhaps there may be some postponement of the matter until we ourselves are present; and then you will see that we are of no use, since there are none who obey.

To Nectarius. Many blessings be on those who move your honor to constant conversation with us by letter. For do not think that we do such things out of mere custom; out of true affection we value your voice most highly. For what could be more precious to me than Nectarius, who from boyhood was known to us for the noblest qualities, and has now, through every kind of virtue, risen to such distinction? So the dearest of all my friends is whoever brings me letters from you. As for the election of those who are to preside over the community: if I do anything to gratify men, or yielding to entreaties, or giving way to fear, may I not do it. For I would be not a steward but a huckster, trading the gift of God for human friendships. But if the votes are given by men, who can testify only from outward appearance to what they testify, while the judgment of who is more suitable is entrusted by our lowliness to him who knows the secrets of the hearts, perhaps it is in every way better, having given one's testimony, to keep aloof from all partisanship and dissension, as though those testified about were one's own, and to pray God that what is advantageous may not be missed. For in this way we shall no longer blame any man for the outcome either way, but shall thank God for what happens. And yet, if these things are done after the manner of men, they are not done at all; it is an imitation, but falls far short of the truth. Consider, too, that no small danger lies near the one who strives to have his own way by every means: lest we draw upon ourselves a share of the sins committed. For many sins may be committed even by those from whom one would never have expected it, because of the frailty of human nature. Then, when we have often privately advised our friends what is best, even if we seem unconvincing to those taking our advice, we are not angry; but where it is not men's counsel but God's judgment, shall we be vexed at not being preferred even to the judgments of God? If, then, it is given by men, why must one ask it of us, and not take it from himself? But if it is given by the Lord, one ought to pray, not to be indignant; and in prayer not to ask for one's own will, but to entrust what is advantageous to God who orders all things. May the holy God turn away from your house every experience of grievous things, and measure out to yourself and to all who belong to you a life free from disease and harm, in all prosperity.

To Timotheus the chorepiscopus. To write all that I think does not seem to me to fit the measure of a letter, nor otherwise to befit the form of a greeting; and to pass it over in silence is almost impossible for me, since my heart is inflamed with just anger against you. I will take the middle way, then, writing some things and leaving others. For I wish to rebuke you, if it is allowed, with the frankness of a friend. If that Timotheus, whom we have known from boyhood to show such intensity toward correctness and the disciplined life that he was charged with excess in these things, has now given up considering how, by doing in every way what he ought, he may be made God's own, and you look to what So-and-so thinks of you, and have made your life depend on the opinion of others, and think about how not to be useless to your friends nor laughable to your enemies, and fear the disgrace of the many as something terrible, do you not consider that, while you spend your time on these things, you are falling unawares from the life that should come first? For that it is not possible to master both together, the affairs of this world and the life according to God, the divine Scriptures are full of teaching; and nature itself is full of such examples. For in the activity of the mind it is altogether impossible to think two thoughts at the same time; and in the perceptions of sense it is impossible to receive and distinguish at the same moment two voices striking the ears together, even though two passages of hearing are open to us. And the eyes, unless both are directed to one visible object, cannot do their work exactly. These are the examples from nature; to tell you those from the Scriptures would be no less ridiculous than, as they say, bringing an owl to the Athenians. Why, then, do we mix what cannot be mixed, the turmoil of public life and the practice of godliness? Should we not rather withdraw from the turmoil, from having affairs and giving others affairs, and become our own; and confirm by deed the aim of godliness that we set ourselves long ago, and show those who wish to harass us that it is not in their power to grieve us whenever they like? This will be when we show ourselves free of every handle. So much for this. May we some day be together and take counsel more exactly about what is advantageous to our souls, so that we may not be overtaken in our care for vain things when the necessary departure comes upon us. I was greatly pleased with what your love sent; they were most pleasant in their own nature, but the addition of the sender made the pleasure many times greater. As for the things from Pontus, wax candles and herbs, receive them gladly when we send them; for at present we did not have them.

To Palladius. The holy God has fulfilled half our desire by arranging a meeting with our most decorous sister, your wife. And he is able to grant what remains too, so that, when we have seen your nobility as well, we may render God perfect thanks. For we are in great desire, especially now that we have heard that you have been honored with the great honor, the immortal garment, which, enveloping our humanity, has done away with death in the flesh, and what is mortal has been swallowed up in the garment of incorruption. Since, then, the Lord has made you his own through grace, has estranged you from all sin, has opened the kingdom of heaven to you and shown you the roads that lead to the blessedness there, we urge you, a man who so surpasses others in prudence, to receive the grace thoughtfully, and to become a faithful guardian of the treasure, keeping guard over the royal deposit with all care, so that, preserving the seal inviolate, you may stand before the Lord shining in the brightness of the saints, putting no spot or wrinkle on the pure garment of incorruption, but preserving holiness in all your members, as one who has put on Christ. "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ," it says, "have put on Christ." Let all your members, then, be holy, fit to be covered with the holy and luminous garment. [Letter 293] To Julianus. How has your body been in this intervening time? Have you fully recovered the use of your hand? And how are the other affairs of your life? Do they go according to your mind, as we pray, and as is due to your purpose? For those whose mind is easily changed, it is not unlikely that their life too is disordered; but for those whose judgment is firm and always steady, it follows that they live a life in agreement with their purpose. For truly a pilot is not permitted to make calm when he wishes; but for us it is very easy to make our life free of waves, if we silence the turmoil that arises within us from the passions, and set our judgment higher than what strikes us from outside. For neither losses, nor illnesses, nor the other hardships of life will touch the earnest man, so long as he has his mind walking with God and looking to the future, and rising lightly and nimbly above the storm stirred up from below. For those who are violently seized by the cares of life, like fat birds with useless wings, drag themselves along below with the cattle. We were permitted to see you only as much as those who pass one another at sea. But since one can know the whole lion from its claw, we think we have come to know you sufficiently from a brief experience; and so we make much of being held in some account by you, and of not being absent from your mind, but being constantly with you in memory …

To Festus and Magnus. It befits fathers, I suppose, to care for their own children, and farmers for their plants or seeds, and teachers for their pupils, especially when, through good natural gifts, these show better hopes of themselves. For the farmer rejoices in his toil when the ears or the plants grow strong for him; and pupils gladden their teachers, and children their fathers, the one by advancing in virtue, the other in growth. We have so much the greater care for you, and the better hope, as godliness is better than every art, and better than all animals and fruits together; we pray to see it, rooted and nourished by us in your still tender and pure souls, advance to perfect maturity and to ripe fruit, your love of learning cooperating with our prayers. For know well that both our good will toward you and the cooperation of God are stored up in your own purposes; and when these are directed toward what is right, God, called as fellow worker, is present even unbidden, and every God-loving man volunteers to teach. For the eagerness of those who can teach something useful is invincible when the souls of the learners are clear of all resistance. So not even separation of bodies is a hindrance, since he who created us, in his surpassing wisdom and love for humankind, did not confine the mind together with the body, nor the power of words to the tongue, but gave something more, even with respect to time, to those able to benefit others, so that they can pass on their teaching not only to those far away but even to those born much later. And experience confirms this for us: since those who lived many years before teach the young, the teaching being preserved in writing; and we, though so far separated in body, are always with you in mind and converse with you easily, our teaching being hindered neither by land nor by sea, if you have any care for your own souls.

[To monks.] … you ought to provide in deed for one another, through constant conversation and encouragement. Above all we urge you to remember the faith of the Fathers, and not to be shaken by those who try to carry you about in your quiet life, knowing that neither strictness of life by itself, if not enlightened by faith in God, is of any use, nor will a right confession, if it lacks good works, be able to present us to the Lord; but both must go together, that the man of God may be complete, and our life may not limp in what is lacking. For it is faith that saves us, as the Apostle says, "working through love."

To Eleuthera. Conjecturing your disposition toward us, and knowing your zeal for the work of the Lord, we made bold recently, as with a daughter, and kept the mules in use rather longer; sparingly, as though using our own, but nevertheless we did prolong their service. This had to be written to your dignity, so that you may know that what we did is a proof of our affection. At the same time we remind your decency by this letter to remember the Lord, and, always setting before your eyes the departure from this world, to order your life for the defense to be made before the Judge who cannot be deceived, so that you may have boldness on account of good works before him who will reveal the secrets of our hearts in the day of his visitation. Through you we greet your most noble daughter; and I urge her to spend her time in meditation on the oracles of the Lord, so that her soul may be nourished by good teaching, and her mind may advance to growth and greatness more than her body does by nature.

To Eleuthera. Judging it very fitting for me, both because of my advanced age and because of the genuineness of our spiritual affection, to visit your incomparable nobility in bodily presence too, and, when absent, not to fall short, but to fill up what is lacking by letters, since I found this woman a fitting bearer of letters to your dignity, through her I address you, first of all urging you on to the work of the Lord, so that the holy God, having brought you honorably through the days of your sojourn in all godliness and dignity, may make you worthy also of the good things to come. Then I commend to you the aforesaid daughter, that you may receive her as my daughter and your own sister, and that, in whatever she shares with your decorous and pure soul, you may make her concerns your own and help her, having your reward first from the Lord, and then also refreshing us, who fulfill the measure of love toward you in the heart of Christ.

Without address, concerning a devout man. That you deign to use us as counsellors and partners in your cares in everything, you do what befits your perfection; and may God reward you both for your love toward us and for your care in life. But I was surprised that this deception touched you, and that you have believed that some irrational power is present in water; and this, though no testimony confirms the report. For there is no one among those there who has received, small or great, for his body any of the good he hoped for; unless some relief came to someone by chance, such as naturally comes to people while they sleep or go about their other business in life. But he who destroys love persuades the simpler sort to ascribe chance happenings to the nature of the water. That our word is true, you can learn from experience itself. [Letter 299] To a censitor. I know that you wrote to me that you are reluctant to take on the care of public affairs. For it is an old saying that those who lay claim to virtue do not take on offices with pleasure. For I see that what belongs to physicians belongs also to rulers. For they see terrible things and experience unpleasant ones, and reap griefs of their own from the misfortunes of others; I mean those who are truly rulers. For all the merchant sort of men, who look to money and are excited about this kind of glory, count it the greatest of goods to obtain some power, by which they will be able to do good to friends, take vengeance on enemies, and gain for themselves what they are eager for. But you are not such a man. How could you be? You who willingly withdrew even from so great a civic power; and when you could rule the city like a single household, you chose the quiet and peaceful life, valuing having no affairs and giving none to others more highly than the rest value their perversity. But since the Lord has willed that the country of the Iborites should not be under hucksters, nor the assessment be like a slave market, but that each should be registered as is just, accept the task, even if otherwise troublesome, as something that can bring you approval with God. And neither cower before power nor despise poverty, but give those you govern a judgment more unswerving than any balance. For so your zeal for justice will become plain to those who have trusted you, and they will admire you above the others. Or even if it escapes them, it will not escape our God, who has set before us great prizes for good works.

To the father of a student who had died, consolatory. Since the Lord has set us in a second rank of fathers for Christians, entrusting to us the forming in godliness of the children who have believed in him, we have reckoned the calamity that befell your blessed son as our own, and we groaned over the untimeliness of his parting; sympathizing above all with you, and reckoning how great the weight of pain will be for his father by nature, since even in us, who have been made his kin by the commandment, such dejection of heart arose. For in his case there was nothing gloomy to suffer or to say; pitiable are those who have failed of the hopes set on him. And truly they deserve many tears and groans, who sent a son in the very bloom of youth to the study of letters, and received him back silent, with this long and dreaded silence. These things moved us at once, as men; and we shed a hasty tear and let out an undisciplined groan from the midst of the heart, the grief suddenly enveloping our reason like a cloud. But when we came to ourselves, and looked with the eye of the soul at the nature of human things, we made our excuse to the Lord for the way our soul had been affected, as by a sudden seizure, at what had happened, and admonished ourselves to bear moderately these things, which God's ancient sentence has allotted to human life. A boy is gone, of the very age of life's prime, distinguished among the companies of his age-mates, beloved by his teachers, able by a mere meeting to draw even the most savage to good will; quick in learning, gentle in character, composed beyond his age; and one who said more than this would still say less than the truth; but still a man, born of a man. What, then, ought the father of such a son to reckon? What else than to remember his own father, that he died? What wonder, then, that one born of a mortal became the father of a mortal? That it was before the season, before being sated with life, before reaching the measure of his age, and appearing before men, and leaving a succession to his family: these, as I persuade myself, are not an increase of the grief, but a consolation for what has happened. The ordering of God deserves thanks, that he did not leave orphaned children on earth; that he did not leave a widowed wife given over to long affliction, or likely to marry another husband and neglect the former children. As for the boy's life not being prolonged in this world, who is so unfeeling as not to think this the greatest of goods? For a longer stay here is the occasion of more evils. He did no evil; he stitched no deceit against his neighbor; he did not come under the necessity of mixing with companies of evildoers; he was not entangled in the evils of the marketplace; he did not undergo the necessity of sins: no falsehood, no ingratitude, no greed, no love of pleasure, none of the passions of the flesh that naturally arise in undisciplined souls; he departed with his soul branded by no stain, but went away pure to the better lot. Earth has not hidden the beloved, but heaven has received him. God, who orders our affairs, who lays down for each the boundaries of his times, who brought him into this life, has himself removed him. We have as our teacher, in the extremities of calamity, that famous voice of the great Job: "The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; as it seemed good to the Lord … blessed forever."

To Maximus, consolatory. How we were affected on hearing of your calamity, no words could suffice to present vividly: now reckoning the loss which the whole body of the devout has suffered, having lost the protectress of her order; now considering into what dejection the cheerfulness of your dignity has fallen; seeing in our mind a house counted blessed by all bowed to its knees, and a common life grown together in the utmost harmony dissolved faster than a dream. How, even if we were made of adamant, could our souls not have been bowed down? From our very first meeting there arose a kinship between us and your dignity, and we became so attached to your virtue as to have your affairs on our tongue at every hour; and when we also came to know that blessed soul, we were truly persuaded that the word of the Proverb was confirmed in you both, that "a wife is fitted to a husband by God." So well suited were you to each other in character, each showing in himself the other's character as in a mirror. And one who said much would not reach even a small part of what is deserved. But what must one feel before a law of God that has long prevailed: that he who has come into being must depart again at the appointed times, and that each soul, having rendered to life its necessary service, is then released from the bonds of the body? We are neither the first to suffer this, admirable friend, nor the only ones; but what our parents and grandparents and all the ancestors of our race experienced, we too have come to experience. And the present life is full of such examples. But you, who so excel others in virtue, ought even amid sufferings to keep the greatness of your soul unhumbled, not vexed at the present loss, but grateful to the giver for the original gift. For to die is common to all who share the same nature; but to live with a good wife has fallen to few of those counted blessed in life; so that even to bear the separation with grief is no small gift of God, to those who reason fairly. For we have known many who received the dissolution of an ill-suited marriage as the laying down of a burden. Look up at this heaven, and the sun, and survey the whole creation round about, that these things, so many and so great, will shortly not appear; and gather from all this that, being part of a creation that dies, we have received what falls to us from our common nature; since marriage itself is a consolation for dying. For since it was not possible to remain forever, the Creator contrived continuance in life through the succession of the race. And if we are grieved that she departed before us too soon, let us not begrudge her, who was not filled for long with the troubles of life, but left us while we still longed for her, like the charm of flowers. Above all let the doctrine of the resurrection console you, since you are a Christian and pass your life in hope of the good things to come. So we ought to think of her as one who has gone ahead along a road that we too must travel. And if she has gone before us, this is not worth lamentation. For perhaps a little later our lot will be more pitiable, if, being stretched out longer in life, we become liable to more punishments. But let care to please the Lord take the place of your grief.