Sermon on the Life of Honoratus 23–39

Meanwhile, as I recall his great grace toward all, I am passing over his boundless care for me, though his care certainly brought me no small part of salvation in Christ. For for my sake, as far as his merit and my judgment are concerned, he did not disdain to come back to the homeland he had disdained; nor did he shrink from the labour of so long a journey, heavy especially because of his many long-standing infirmities; and there, with gentle hand, as a seducer and yet truthful, he tries to bring me to the love of Christ, me who even in those years was a friend to the world and defiant to God. It would take long to describe the force of his talent in his exhortations, in which, since even before his own resolve he had been able to apply the sharpest goads to himself for conversion, he now poured out manifold, having drunk from the springs of wisdom. But when the words of his piety descended too little into my ears, he turned to his usual defence of prayer, and the cry of his affection, repelled by my hardness, knocked at and pierced the most loving ears of God, even to obtaining mercy. And truly, when I struggled against him and sometimes even bound my obstinacy by an oath, out of that very dangerous worldly habit, he had promised beforehand with what I may call a prophetic spirit: 'What you do not grant me,' he said, 'God will grant.' And O how long he tried to soften my hardness with a shower of tears! How he contended with me for my salvation with loving kisses and embraces! For the present, however, as he said, I won a most evil victory. Thereafter the right hand of God took me up to be harried and tamed; for he had handed me over to it by prayer. What waves there were then in my heart! What storms of different and mutually warring wills were stirred up! How often willing and not willing took turns in my mind! In short, in his absence Christ carries out his part in me: after two days, through his prayers and by God's mercy, my defiance is subdued. For thought had put sleep to flight, and, as the loving Lord invited me, the whole world with its pleasures stood before me at a distance. What I was being urged to seek, and what to leave, my mind debated with me, as though in counsel with a friend. Thanks to you, good Jesus, thanks, who broke my bonds, moved by the loving supplication of your servant Honoratus, and cast on me the bonds of your love, by which, if I am held, the bonds of sin will never grow strong again. So I go to meet him, submissive, I who had gone away proud, and, laying aside every objection, I come as a new suppliant. So, so does the prayer of a saint bring back its fugitives, subdue the defiant, and take the rebels by storm.

Then with what tears he watered my dryness, with what loving weeping he drew me too into tears! He received me with such humility and gentleness, as though he himself were being received by me. At once the cause of delay was removed. Then for the first time he recognized that homeland which he had long believed must be fled. He leads me out with him, his prey; he rejoices, triumphs, exults. He hastens to shut me up in the desert, already eager for seclusion by his example. He feeds me first with milk, and afterwards with solid food. He gives me drink too from that flowing spring of heavenly wisdom which was in him. And would that the narrowness of my spirit had received as much as he strove to pour in! He would surely have prepared me for you and given you one worthy of your desire; and without knowing it he would have trained a fit successor for himself. And how much he added to me, if I may say so without envy, of that love of his that flowed out to all, and how much lighter he made the light yoke of Christ for me by his gentleness! How often he called me his mind, how often his soul, how often his little tongue! How impatient he was of my absence, how always eager for the sight of me, unworthy as I was! What shall I say of all these things, except that prophetic word: may the Lord repay him for me?

Meanwhile, dearest brothers, touching briefly on what was done rather than recounting it, I have gone over things about your most skilful shepherd which were known to others rather than to you. For we saw his priesthood increased in name in this church, though in holiness and deeds it was already the highest before. But how was it, I ask, that one so unknown was sought from so far? Who fixed in your hearts that favour toward one absent and never seen before? Who stirred up that longing, so that he should be born to you, while those to whom the Lord had granted him in the desert were bereaved? Surely he who orders all things; he who granted him to his homeland as long as he saw fit, and carried the grace of so great a worshipper of his around over seas and lands for the benefit of those who saw it.

In sum, from the brief time during which he was given to you, it is easy to measure how far what I say of him in these matters falls short or exceeds. For you saw, dearest brothers, that watchfulness of his care, that zeal for discipline, those tears of piety, that constant and perpetual serenity of mind, to which his unchanging face bore witness. You heard also that mouth in keeping with his life, in which purity of heart matched brilliance of speech. You saw that breadth of love which was so great in him that the same holy man whose saying I quoted just now said of him with good reason that, if love itself had to be portrayed according to its own choice, it would seem that it ought to be painted above all in the face of Honoratus. Who, then, ever thought he had seen him enough? To whom did he not take the place of every affection? Who so joined gentleness with severity? Who so offered discipline mixed with cheerfulness? Whom did he correct without the joy of the one corrected? When did his gladness smell of any levity? When was his sadness not wholesome? When was his groaning not born of grief over another's sin? Who did not find him greater than he had seen him before? Always set at the summit of the virtues, he always found where he could grow.

Under his exhortation, what anxious man did not lay down his pain? What man of savage character did not curse his madness? What arrogant man did not loathe his own pride more than anyone? What wanton man did not detest his luxury? In short, made all things to all, as the Apostle says, he was the common medicine of all. There was almost no grace which he did not hold so firmly that he might be thought to cultivate and possess it specially, as though it were his only one. In no rank of life did he fail to flourish so that he seemed specially suited to it.

Indeed, as soon as he received the government of this church of Arles, his first care was for concord, and his chief labour to bind together in mutual love the brotherhood, still divided by passions heated over the choice of a bishop. As a proven driver of Israel, he knew well that nothing is easily commanded to those in discord. He strove, besides, to rule by love rather than to dominate by terror, so that correction, voluntary rather than forced, might add this ornament too to his subjects, that they should not seem compelled to their duty. So, discord being at once shut out, he gave place to love, which is the mother of all virtues. The church of Christ therefore flourished under him, as the monastery had flourished before. It grew in graces and diminished in metals: once discipline had entered, he shut the mammon of iniquity out of his house as out of the Lord's house; what had long been heaped up idle he at last assigned to worthy uses; he sent their treasures on to those long dead, and those who had offered them felt once more the refreshment of their offerings. He kept back only what was sufficient for his ministry; and if need had required, he would not, I think, have spared even that. He made the vows of an earlier time his own to dispense.

He did not stop working even at the end. He enriched many from his bed by dispensing the word. But how long did the bed hold him, who had long grown used to overcoming even the weariness close to death? Last of all, with pains already struggling against him, he preached a sermon in the church on the day of Epiphany: never knowing, as faith wrestled with his infirmities, how to yield to the pain of the body rather than to the fervour of the spirit, he served your desires beyond his strength. For it was not some illness coming upon him from outside, nor a sudden heat of fever, that carried him off; but a long-drawn-out infirmity, contracted long before through the excessive rigour of his way of life and growing worse because he gave too little room to relaxation, consumed him by gradual wasting on the eighth or ninth day after that feast. Yet for scarcely four days did he deny his presence to us, who were busy with the duties of love, fearing, surely, that the nearness of his passing would sadden his own. He was never a burden to anyone amid the gravest illnesses; his infirmities did not cause anyone, as usually happens, any horror. And so, in this way, that dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit came to rest.

It is incredible how whole he kept the vigour of that unstained mind to the very end. First, he always comforted his own most abundantly and feared nothing more than that they should be worn down by long despair, understanding that the end is almost easier to bear than uncertainty. He always wiped away the tears of those standing round with well-seasoned words, though the more he wiped them away, the more he provoked them. Hence he reckoned our grief heavier than his own pain. Not easily would anyone, with so strong a heart amid whatever harsh and hard things there were to bear, have neither wished for death nor feared it. For he whom it had not irked to live amid all kinds of hardship in the service of Christ did not fear to pass to the new life through that common gate of new life. For the last necessity of human beings had been meditated on by him beforehand, and did not come upon him suddenly. So, under the very sight of the end, as though emigrating, as though bidding farewell, lest he leave anything unfinished or arrange anything less fully than he had intended, he questioned each of us and urged us to remind him if anything had escaped his memory. Meanwhile he confirmed everything with his signature, and when we wanted to spare his weariness, he compelled us to do everything that had to be done; he compelled us, as always, with that gentle command of his.

Once, when I was struggling to hold back the storm of my tears and to stop the streams of my weeping, he said: 'Why do you weep at the inevitable necessity of the human race? Ought my passing to find you unprepared, when it has not found me unprepared?' And when I, hindered by sobs, added as best I could to his words that I no longer grieved at my own bereavement, since I trusted that the patronage of his prayers would never fail me, and indeed I presumed that it would be stronger after his passing, but that I was gravely afflicted by the single wound of his pains and of his hard struggles at the end, he said: 'And what do I, the least of all, bear compared with what very many of the saints endured most bitterly at their end?' And having mentioned some of them, he added what I believe he had read somewhere: 'Great men,' he said, 'suffer much, and they are born as an example, to teach others to suffer.'

When the authorities gathered to him, the prefect and men of prefectorian rank, how fervent were the commands he brought out under the chill of death, taking the sharpest opening for his exhortation from his own departure! And it was plainly fitting that he who had always given examples of life should summon even his death as an example. 'You see,' he said, 'how fragile a lodging we live in. However high we climb in life, from there death will drag us down. No honours, no treasures redeem anyone from this necessity. It is common to the just and the unjust, to the powerful and the humble. We owe great thanks to Christ, who by his own death and resurrection has given life to our death with the hope of resurrection, offering eternal life and dispelling the horror of eternal death. So live your life that you may not fear the end of life; and await what we call death as a change of dwelling. Death is not a penalty if it does not lead to punishment. Hard indeed is the tearing apart of flesh and soul; but much harder will be the partnership of flesh and soul in the flames of Gehenna, unless throughout life the spirit, recognizing its nobility, declares war on the body and battle on bodily vices, and, separated from the filth of the flesh by a happy divorce, keeps both substances unstained for eternal peace, to be happily joined there where the saints will exult in glory and rejoice on their couches, that is, in their bodies as in their own dwellings, when they recognize as their accustomed lodgings the members, their companions, which they had dedicated to righteousness. Do this, then; this is the inheritance your Honoratus leaves you; with his last breath he invites you to the inheritance of the heavenly kingdom. Let no one be held by too much love of this world. It is best to disdain by will what you see you will lose by necessity. Let no one melt away in riches, let no one be a slave to money, let the vain pomp of riches corrupt no one. It is a crime to take the price of salvation as the material of perdition, and for anyone to be caught by that by which he could be redeemed.' Meanwhile he admonished more by his face, more by his eyes, more by his mind flashing toward heaven. The words of one who reports it are unequal to his fiery speech; but no less unequal to his spirit were the words of the one admonishing. So, having poured out his prayer with such exhortation and with an unusual emotion, he bestowed an extraordinary gift of blessing.

As the service of his limbs failed, new grace of mind kept springing up. When everything had been arranged (for not many of his affairs remained incomplete), running over all his dear ones in his mind, he enriched with a greeting sent through those standing by all those whom his weariness did not allow him to name. To me he said in my ear: 'Make my excuses to that holy man, that what he wished could not be done.' Great and admirable care, amid those grave straits of death, to have provided that he should not fail, as far as in him lay, to wipe away anyone's sadness, and certainly not to leave anything unexcused! And what of this, I ask: that, though he was leaving among strangers all his own whom his love had drawn to this city, he commended no return to anyone, no fellowship, and did not assign fixed places to live, as though truly foreknowing that there would be no dispersal of his own, except of those who had already, while he was still alive, departed in the decision of their minds? And truly we know of hardly anyone who has left our fellowship except someone whose departure he himself foretold, who had found either his homeland dearer than the sight of him or the discipline too heavy. Meanwhile a heavier sleep pressed on him; and when, alarmed, we sometimes interrupted it, he said: 'I am surprised that in such great weariness of mine, after such long sleepless nights as went before, my sleep seems heavy to you.' And when, fearing everything, we urged him at the last to stay sitting up longer, he replied with jesting gentleness, as was his custom, and his usual serenity of mind, that he would bear with our being troublesome in this part of our anxiety. So his life was spent almost before his sweetness was.

Then, taken by his last sleep, he passed away sleeping into the rest of death, without any of the struggle that the last moments usually bring. He felt none of the hard delays of dying. That holy, noble, sincere soul, untouched by any contact with the world, is received by angelic choirs. Meanwhile the sleep of many is visited by various visions, all of which, however, had one form: that the companies of the saints went out to meet that holy man. And truly, at once, at that same point of midnight, a gathering filled the church to meet the holy body, so that it was thought to have been roused only by angelic messengers. The lifeless body remains, always enlivened by the spirit, full of grace; for his face, dear to all, kept the whole beauty of his countenance. You know these things well, and you depict them for yourselves far more fully in the meditation of your minds than words can.

Nor did anyone not think himself to suffer great loss if he missed the sight of his body, if he did not, as reverence or love moved each, press a kiss on his mouth or on any of his limbs, or on the bier on which that holy body had been clothed with great eagerness of faith and afterwards, as it was brought to the tomb, stripped with greater. For faith did not spare even the cloaks sanctified by his clothing, and counted it a most precious gift to have plucked some fringe of his coverings. Your affection vied in his funeral rites. In his funeral you refreshed my pilgrimage, still hidden among you; you fed me with such love of your hearts poured out on him. For whom did his own roof hold that day? Or whom, overwhelmed as by a grief of his own, did the walls of this city not give to this basilica? It was counted a great honour to have put one's hand to the bier or set one's neck under it. You saw his glory, not without your own glory: for that reverence of the funeral was the devotion of faith, and it was as joyful to have had such a man as it was grievous to have lost him. Nor does the grace of his tomb give us little confidence: for we presume to have in heaven the patronage of the one whose bones we have laid here. We saw spices and incense carried before his bier; but God received greater perfumes from your minds, in your great affection toward so great a shepherd. The glory of God leapt for joy before him in his glory, and love was in harmony among the dissonant choirs of different languages.

The loving Lord, who, by stirring your minds to the election of my littleness, granted that I should not be far from his tomb, will grant this too at your prayers, that I may not depart far from his ways, but may hasten to do whatever I learn that he did, without any examination or discussion of his deeds. For God, as I see, begot me for you through him even then. For you he prepared me, unworthy as I am. For you he sought me with such labour, without knowing it. For you he trained me, after a fashion, with such eager care and concern, seeking in me the vein of faith as of his own blood. For you he strove with such labour by letters, with such urging on his journey, to remove me from the island to which I had returned out of love of seclusion when he left it at the beginning of his episcopate (I do not dare to say without knowing it; perhaps foreknowing it), so as to settle my homeland in your love beside the seat of his tomb. But what are we to do, since by his timely departure he has handed me over to you untimely? It is not for us to blame, even lightly, in anything the secret judgment of the eternal King: you would not easily have felt what good you had lost, had your good been given back to you whole.

O great and renowned is your glory, Honoratus! Your merit did not need to be proved by signs; for your way of life itself, full of virtues and lofty in the newness of the admiration it aroused, provided a kind of perpetual sign. Many things, indeed, were granted to you by God, as we know who stood closer to you; but among them you counted the least part, and your greater joy was that Christ should write down your merits and virtues than that men should note your signs. And yet what greater sign of virtue can there be than to flee signs and hide virtues? And truly your prayer was in a way so familiar to the ears of Christ that I think it was obtained by your most earnest prayers that signs should not proclaim your virtue. Peace too has its martyrs; for you were a perpetual witness of Christ as long as you dwelt in the body. This too is astonishing, that the strength of your youth, thinned by the perpetual rigour of abstinence and reduced to the slenderness of appearance which we saw, though its beauty was kept, was consumed by a daily cross; which you nevertheless always kept without any notable excess of scruple, always fleeing all extremes and the desire for glory that is akin to extremes. Never was anything in your mouth but peace, chastity, piety, love. Never did anything dwell in your heart but Christ, the fountain of all these, who ministered to you, and through you to very many, the fruits of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, goodness, kindness, faith, modesty, continence, overflowing in manifold abundance for the salvation and joy of many; so that not without reason you sang to him: 'Those who fear you will see me and rejoice'; to him you always ascribed every good of your way of life, constantly pressing on yourself and your own: 'What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as though you had not received it?' But the good of your life was the more yours, the more you denied that it was yours.

In you was the common comfort of all who long for the Lord. Some glory in the prosperity of this life; you, on the contrary, urged us to exult in God, murmuring with a voice of gentle melody what echoed your affection: 'Let the heart of those who seek the Lord rejoice.' You never had a greater pleasure than in prayers and psalms. Christ had so settled in your inmost parts that sometimes, I speak from experience, when your limbs were bound in peaceful sleep, your tongue sounded him even in dreams in its usual office. Often, sleeping, you poured out words of most wholesome exhortation, often words of most loving prayer. For in the bed there was rest for the body, and for the mind rest in Christ. And these things we experienced, each of us who was present. And you, the one rest of all, how eagerly, how often you told your dreams, not foreboding anything nor anxious with any worry about the future, but roused by the restless desires of the soul: martyrdom, namely, which you always carried in your meditation; and, the Lord, I believe, sometimes playing with and provoking your desire, you went through it in sleep as though a persecution had been stirred up against your faith. And truly I think no one would deny that what you lacked for martyrdom was torturers, not spirit. For daily, in most sincere discourses, you were a witness to the confession of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Nor has anyone easily discoursed so clearly, so lucidly on the Trinity of the Godhead, distinguishing it in persons and uniting it in the eternity and majesty of glory.

Remember, then, friend of God, remember us always, as you stand undefiled before God, singing that new song and following the Lamb wherever he goes. You are his attendant; be our patron, an acceptable interpreter of our prayers and a strong advocate. Carry up the prayers of your foster flock poured out at your tomb; obtain that, by common accord, all together, priest and people, may deserve to attain in some measure what you commanded and what you taught. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who took you up into his glory, and who lives and reigns as God with his Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen.