Letters 108.29–112.1

From then on there was no wailing and beating of breasts, as is usual among people of the world, but swarms of monks resounded with psalms in different languages. She was carried by the hands of bishops, the (stronger) of them putting their shoulders under the bier, while other bishops carried lamps and candles before her and others led the choirs of singers, and she was laid in the middle of the church of the Saviour's cave. The whole crowd of the cities of Palestine came to her funeral. What monk hidden in the desert did his cell hold back? What virgin did the privacy of her chamber keep? He thought it a sacrilege who had not paid the last duty to such a woman. Widows and poor people, after the example of Dorcas, showed the garments she had given them; the whole multitude of the needy cried out that they had lost their mother and nurse. And, what is wonderful, pallor had not changed her face at all, but such dignity and gravity had filled her features that you would think her not dead but asleep. Psalms resounded in order in Greek, Latin, and Syriac, not only for three days until she was laid beneath the church beside the Lord's cave, but for the whole week, all who had come believing it their own funeral and their own tears. The venerable virgin, her daughter Eustochium, like a child weaned from its mother, could not be drawn away from her parent: she kissed her eyes, clung to her face, embraced her whole body, and wished to be buried with her mother.

Jesus is witness that not a single coin was left by her to her daughter, but, as I said before, a great debt, and, what is harder than this, an immense multitude of brothers and sisters, whom it is difficult to support and impious to cast off. What could be more wonderful than this virtue: that a woman of a most noble family, once of great wealth, gave everything away with such faith that she came almost to the last degree of poverty? Let others boast of money, of coins heaped into God's treasury, and of gifts hanging by golden cords: no one gave more to the poor than she who left nothing for herself. Now she enjoys the riches and the good things that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man. We grieve for our own loss, and we shall seem rather to envy her glory if we choose to weep longer for one who reigns.

Be at ease, Eustochium: you have been enriched with a great inheritance. 'The Lord is your portion'; and, that you may rejoice the more, your mother has been crowned with a long martyrdom. Not only the shedding of blood in confession is counted, but the service of a devoted mind is also a daily martyrdom. That crown is woven of roses and violets, this of lilies. Hence it is written in the Song of Songs, 'My beloved is white and ruddy,' giving the same rewards to the victors in peace and in war. Your mother, I say, heard with Abraham, 'Go out from your land and from your kindred, and come into the land which I will show you,' and the Lord commanding through Jeremiah, 'Flee from the midst of Babylon and save your souls'; and to the day of her death she did not return to Chaldea, nor did she long for the fleshpots of Egypt and their savoury meats; but, accompanied by choirs of virgins, she became a fellow citizen of the Saviour, and, ascending from little Bethlehem to the heavenly kingdom, she says to the true Naomi: 'Your people are my people, and your God my God.'

I have dictated this book for you in two short night-sittings, with the same grief that you bear. For as often as I tried to fix my pen and write out the promised work, so often my fingers stiffened, my hand fell, my mind grew faint. Hence the unpolished style bears witness to the writer's wish, without any elegance or charm of words.

Farewell, Paula, and help by your prayers the extreme old age of your admirer. Your faith and works join you to Christ; being in his presence, you will more easily obtain what you ask. 'I have completed a monument more lasting than bronze,' which no length of time can destroy. I have carved an inscription on your tomb, which I have added to this volume, so that wherever our writing reaches, the reader may know that you are praised and that you are buried in Bethlehem. The inscription on the tomb: 'She whom Scipio begot, whom the family of Paulus bore, offspring of the Gracchi, renowned descendant of Agamemnon, lies in this tomb; her forebears called her Paula. Mother of Eustochium, first of the Roman senate, she followed the poverty of Christ and the fields of Bethlehem.' And on the door of the cave: 'Do you see a narrow tomb cut in the rock? It is the lodging of Paula, who holds the heavenly kingdom. Leaving brother, kinsfolk, Rome and homeland, riches and offspring, she is laid in the cave of Bethlehem. Here was your manger, O Christ, and here the kings, bearing mystic gifts, gave them to man and God.'

The holy and blessed Paula fell asleep on the seventh day before the Kalends of February, on the third day of the week, after sunset. She was buried on the fifth day before the same Kalends, in the consulship of Honorius Augustus for the sixth time and Aristaenetus. She lived in her holy resolve five years at Rome and twenty years at Bethlehem. The whole time of her life was fifty-six years, eight months, and twenty-one days.

Having received your letter, not to answer it would be pride, and to answer it would be rashness; for you ask about matters that it is sacrilege both to speak of and to hear. You say that Vigilantius (who is called by this name by contraries, for he would more rightly be called Dormitantius, "the Sleeper") is again opening his fetid mouth and pouring out a most filthy stench against the relics of the holy martyrs, and that he calls us who receive them "ash-worshipers" and idolaters, because we venerate the bones of dead men. O unhappy man, to be lamented with every fountain of tears! In saying this he does not understand that he is a Samaritan and a Jew, who regard the bodies of the dead as unclean and suspect that even the vessels that were in the same house are defiled, following the letter that kills and not the Spirit that gives life. We, for our part, do not worship and adore—I do not say the relics of the martyrs—but not even the sun and the moon, not angels, not archangels, not seraphim, not cherubim, "and every name that is named both in the present age and in the one to come," lest we "serve the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever." But we honor the relics of the martyrs so that we may adore him whose martyrs they are; we honor the servants so that the honor of the servants may redound to the Lord, who says: "Whoever receives you receives me." Are the relics of Peter and Paul, then, unclean? Will the little body of Moses be unclean, which, according to the Hebrew original, was buried by the Lord himself? And every time we enter the basilicas of the apostles, the prophets, and all the martyrs, are we venerating temples of idols, and are the candles lit before their tombs the emblems of idolatry? I will say something more, which may recoil upon its author's head and either heal that insane brain at last or destroy it, so that the souls of the simple are not overturned by such sacrileges. Was the Lord's body too, then, unclean when it was laid in the tomb, and were the angels clothed in white garments keeping watch over a dead and defiled corpse, so that many ages later the Sleeper might dream—or rather belch up his most unclean drunkenness—and, with Julian, the persecutor of the saints, either destroy the basilicas or turn them into temples?

I am amazed that the holy bishop in whose diocese he is said to be a presbyter tolerates his madness, and does not, with the apostolic rod and a rod of iron, break the useless vessel and hand him over for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved. Let him remember the saying: "You saw a thief and ran along with him, and you cast your lot with adulterers"; and in another place: "In the morning I put to death all the sinners of the land, to destroy from the city of the Lord all who work iniquity"; and again: "Did I not hate those who hate you, Lord, and pine away over your enemies? I hated them with a perfect hatred." If the relics of the martyrs are not to be honored, how is it that we read: "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints"? If their bones defile those who touch them, how did the dead Elisha raise a dead man and give life—he who, according to Vigilantius, lay unclean? Were the whole camp of the Israelite army and the people of God unclean, then, because they carried the bodies of Joseph and the patriarchs in the wilderness and brought unclean ashes back to the holy land? Was Joseph too, who went before as a type of our Lord and Savior, a wicked man, because with such great ceremony he carried Jacob's bones to Hebron, to join his unclean father to an unclean grandfather and great-grandfather and unite a dead man with the dead? His tongue should be cut out by physicians—or rather his insane head cured—so that he who does not know how to speak may learn at last to keep silent. I, I myself once saw this monster, and I tried to bind the madman with the testimonies of Scripture as with the bonds of Hippocrates; but he went away, departed, escaped, broke out, and between the waves of the Adriatic and the Alps of King Cottius he cried out in declamation against us. For whatever a madman says must be called bawling and clamor.

Perhaps in your silent thoughts you blame me for inveighing against an absent man. I confess my grief to you: I cannot patiently listen to such sacrilege. For I have read of the javelin of Phinehas, the sternness of Elijah, the zeal of Simon the Cananaean, the severity of Peter striking down Ananias and Sapphira, and the constancy of Paul, who condemned Elymas the sorcerer, as he resisted the ways of the Lord, to lasting blindness. Devotion for God's sake is not cruelty. Hence it is said in the Law too: "If your brother and friend and the wife who is in your bosom wishes to turn you aside from the truth, let your hand be upon them, and you shall shed their blood and remove the evil from the midst of Israel." I will say it again: are the relics of the martyrs unclean, then? And what came over the apostles, that they went before the unclean body of Stephen in so great a funeral procession and made great lamentation over him, so that their mourning might be turned into our joy? As for your saying that he execrates vigils, in this too he acts against his own name: Vigilantius, "the Wakeful," wants to sleep, and does not hear the Savior saying: "So could you not watch one hour with me? Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." And in another place the prophet sings: "At midnight I rose to give thanks to you for the judgments of your righteousness." We read too in the Gospel that the Lord spent the night in prayer, and that the apostles, shut up in prison, kept watch the whole night, so that while they sang psalms the earth was shaken, the jailer believed, and the magistrates and the city were terrified. Paul says: "Persevere in prayer, keeping watch in it," and in another place: "in watchings often." So let Vigilantius sleep, and be smothered in his sleep by the destroyer of Egypt along with the Egyptians. Let us say with David: "He who keeps Israel will not slumber or sleep," so that the holy one and the "Ir," which means "watcher," may come to us. And if ever for our sins he sleeps, let us say to him: "Awake! Why do you sleep, Lord?" Let us rouse him, and as the little boat is tossed let us cry: "Master, save us, we are perishing."

I would have dictated more, if the brevity proper to a letter did not impose on me the modesty of silence, and if you had been willing to send us the songs of his books, so that we might know what we ought to answer. As it is, we have beaten the air, and have laid open not so much his unbelief, which is plain to all, as our own faith. But if you want us to write a longer book against him, send us his dirges and nonsense, so that he may hear John the Baptist preaching: "The axe is already laid at the root of the trees. Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire."

Although I suppose that before you received this letter my letter reached your hands—the one I sent by the servant of God, our son the deacon Cyprian, from which you would learn with complete certainty that the letter was mine of which you mentioned that copies had reached you (and so I think I have already begun to be pummeled and tossed about by your replies, like bold Dares by the great and fierce gauntlets of Entellus)—nevertheless I now answer the very letter you were pleased to send me by our holy son Asterius. In it I found many signs of your most kindly love toward me, and again some signs of some offense at me on your part. So where I was being soothed as I read, there I was at once being struck. I wondered above all at this: that you say you did not think you should rashly trust the copies of my letter, lest, if you answered, I might justly complain of being hurt, because you ought first to have proved that the writing was mine and only then have replied; and yet afterward you bid me, if the letter is mine, to write plainly or send truer copies, so that we may engage in the discussion of the Scriptures without any rancor of spirit. For how can we engage in this discussion without rancor if you are preparing to hurt me? Or if you are not preparing to, how could I justly complain of being hurt by you when you had not hurt me, on the ground that you ought first to have proved the writing mine and then replied—that is, then hurt me? For unless you had hurt me by your reply, I could not justly complain. Therefore, when you write back in such a way as to hurt, what room is left us to engage in the discussion of the Scriptures without any rancor? For my part, far be it from me to be hurt if you are willing and able to show me by sound reasoning that you have understood that passage of the apostle's letter, or any other passage of the holy Scriptures, more truly than I; indeed, far be it from me not to count it gain, with thanksgiving, if I am instructed by your teaching or corrected by your emendation.

Yet you, my dearest brother, would not think that I could be hurt by your replies unless you thought yourself hurt by my writings. For I could in no way suppose of you that, not thinking yourself hurt, you nevertheless write back in such a way as to hurt. Or if, though you did not write in that way, I was thought capable of being hurt through my own excessive foolishness, then by this very thing you have plainly hurt me, that you thought such a thing of me. But you would by no means rashly believe me to be such a person, when you have never found me so—you who were unwilling rashly to believe even the copies of my letter, although you knew my style. For if you saw, not without reason, that I would justly have complained had you rashly believed a letter to be mine that was not mine, how much more justly would I complain that I myself had been rashly thought to be such a man as he who thought it did not know me to be! You would never, then, slip so far as to think me so foolish that I could be hurt even by such a reply of yours, if you had not written anything to hurt me.

It remains, then, that you intended to hurt me by your reply if you knew by sure proof that the letter was mine. And so, since I do not believe you would think I ought to be hurt unjustly, it remains for me to acknowledge my sin, that I first hurt you by that letter which I cannot deny is mine. Why then do I strive against the current of the stream, and do not rather ask pardon? I beseech you, therefore, by the gentleness of Christ, that if I have hurt you, you forgive me, and do not in turn repay evil for evil by hurting me. But you will hurt me if you keep silent to me about an error of mine that you may happen to find in my deeds or words. For if you rebuke in me things that are not to be rebuked, you hurt yourself more than me. Far be it from your character and holy purpose to do this with the will to hurt, faulting in me with a slanderous tooth what your truthful mind knows is not to be faulted. Rather, you will either reprove with a kindly heart, even if what you think deserves reproof is free of fault, or you will soothe with a father's affection one whom you cannot cast off. For it can happen that something seems to you other than the truth holds, provided only that you do nothing other than love holds. And I shall receive a most friendly reproof most gratefully, even if what can rightly be defended did not deserve reproof; or else I shall acknowledge both your kindness and my fault, and, as far as the Lord grants, I shall be found grateful in the one case and corrected in the other.

Why then should I dread your words, harsh perhaps but certainly wholesome, like the gauntlets of Entellus? He was beaten, not treated; and so he was defeated, not healed. But if I receive your medicinal correction calmly, I shall not be pained. And if weakness, whether human or my own, cannot help being somewhat saddened even when I am truly reproved, it is better for a swelling on the head to hurt while it is treated than, while it is spared, not to be healed. This is what was keenly seen by the man who said that quarrelsome enemies are often more useful than friends who are afraid to rebuke. For the former, while they wrangle, sometimes say true things that we may correct; but the latter show less freedom than justice requires, while they fear to embitter the sweetness of friendship. Therefore, though you are an ox, as you think yourself, tired perhaps with the old age of the body but not in vigor of mind, still sweating with fruitful labor on the Lord's threshing floor—here I am: if I have said anything amiss, plant your foot more firmly. The weight of your years ought not to trouble me, so long as the chaff of my fault is trampled out.

And so what you put at the end of your letter I read, or recall, with a sigh of great longing. "Would that we might deserve," you say, "your embraces, and by mutual conversation might either teach or learn something!" But I say: would that we at least lived in neighboring lands, so that, if our conversations cannot be mingled, our letters might be more frequent! As it is, we are so far apart in space, so far from each other's perception, that I remember writing to your holiness about those words of the apostle to the Galatians when I was young, and see, I am already old and have not yet earned a reply; and copies of my letter reached you by some chance or other sooner than the letter itself, which I had taken care to send. For the man who had received it then neither delivered it to you nor brought it back to me. And such learning appears in your letters that have been able to come into our hands, that there is nothing I would rather do with my studies, if I could, than cling to your side. Because I cannot, I am thinking of sending one of our sons in the Lord to you to be taught, if I receive your reply on this matter too. For there is not in me so much knowledge of the divine Scriptures as I see in you, nor can there be now; and whatever ability I have in this matter I spend as best I can on the people of God. But because of my church duties I simply cannot give time to instructing students more thoroughly than the people are taught.

We did not know that certain slanderous writings against your name had reached Africa. We have received, however, what you were pleased to send in reply to those slanders. When I had read it, I confess, I was greatly pained that so great an evil of discord should have arisen between persons so dear and intimate, bound by a bond of friendship known to almost all the churches. And indeed your letter shows clearly enough how you restrain yourself and hold back the stings of your indignation, so as not to return abuse for abuse. Yet if, when I read even that, I wasted away with grief and froze with fear, what would the things he wrote against you have done to me if they had happened to come into my hands? "Woe to the world because of offenses!" Look, it is happening; look, what the Truth said is being fulfilled completely: "Because iniquity will abound, the love of many will grow cold." For what faithful hearts can now pour themselves safely into one another? Into whose affection can love throw itself wholly without fear? What friend, in short, is not to be dreaded as a future enemy, if what we lament could arise between Jerome and Rufinus? O wretched and pitiable condition! O untrustworthy knowledge of the present wills of friends, where there is no foreknowledge of the future! But why should I think this is something for one to lament about another, when a man is not known even to himself for the time to come? For he knows somehow—perhaps barely—what he is now; but what he will be afterward he does not know.

But as for this not only knowledge of what each person is, but also foreknowledge of what he will be—if it exists in the holy and blessed angels, I simply do not see how the devil was ever blessed while he was still a good angel, if he knew his future iniquity and everlasting punishment. On this question, if indeed it needs to be known, I should like to hear what you think. See what lands and seas do, which separate us in body! If this letter of mine that you are reading were I, you would already be telling me what I asked; but as it is, when will you write back? When will you send? When will it arrive? When shall I receive it? And yet would that it might happen sometime—what cannot happen as quickly as we wish, we bear with all the patience we can! So I go back to those most sweet words of your letter, full of holy longing, and I make them mine in turn: "Would that we might deserve your embraces, and by mutual conversation might either teach or learn something"—if indeed it could be in any way that I should teach you!

But in these words, now not only yours but mine too, where I delight and am refreshed, and am consoled in no small part even while the longing of both of us hangs in suspense and does not attain its goal, there again I am pierced by the sharpest goads of grief, when I think how, between you two—to whom God had granted in large and generous measure the very thing each of us has longed for, that as most closely joined and intimate friends you might lick together the honey of the holy Scriptures—the ruin of such bitterness crept in. When, where, to what man is this not to be feared, if it could happen to you, at the time when, having cast off the baggage of the world and free for the journey, you were following the Lord and living together in that land where the Lord, walking on human feet, said: "My peace I give to you, my peace I leave to you"—to you, men mature in age and dwelling in the word of the Lord? Truly "man's life on earth is a trial." Woe is me, that I cannot find you together somewhere! Perhaps, moved, grieving, and fearing as I am, I would fall at your feet; I would weep as much as I could, plead as much as I love, now each of you for his own sake, now each for the other and for others, especially the weak for whom Christ died, who watch you with great danger to themselves as if in the theater of this life—that you not spread abroad writing such things about each other that, since you will not be able to erase them once reconciled, you would be unwilling to be reconciled, or would be afraid to read them once reconciled, lest you quarrel again.

I tell your charity truly that nothing made me tremble more than this example, when I read in your letter certain signs of your indignation—not so much those about Entellus and the tired ox, where you seemed to me to be joking cheerfully rather than threatening angrily, as that which was plainly written in earnest (on which I spoke above, perhaps more than I should have, but not more than I feared), where you said: "lest perhaps, being hurt, you might justly complain." I ask you, if it is possible for us to inquire and discuss something between us in such a way that our hearts may be fed without the bitterness of discord, let it be so. But if I cannot say what seems to me to need correction in your writings, nor you in mine, without suspicion of envy or injury to friendship, let us rest from these things and spare our life and salvation. Certainly let the knowledge that puffs up gain less, so long as the love that builds up is not offended. I feel myself far from that perfection of which it is written: "If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man." But surely, by God's mercy, I think I can easily ask pardon from you if I have offended in anything—which you ought to disclose to me, so that when I have heard you, you may gain your brother. Nor, because the distance between our lands keeps you from doing this between you and me alone, ought you therefore to let me go astray. As to the matters themselves that we wish to know, if I know or believe or think that I hold something true on which you think otherwise, I shall try, as far as the Lord gives, to maintain it without injury to you. But as to your offense, when I perceive that you are indignant, I shall do nothing but ask pardon.

Nor do I think at all that you could have been angry unless I either said what I ought not, or did not say it as I ought; for I do not wonder that we know each other less than we are known by those most closely joined and intimate with us. Into their love, I confess, I easily throw myself wholly, especially when wearied by the offenses of the world, and in it I rest without any anxiety; for I feel that God is there, into whom I throw myself without fear and in whom I rest without fear. Nor in this security of mine do I at all fear that uncertain tomorrow of human frailty over which I groaned above. For when I feel that a man burning with Christian love has become a faithful friend to me through it, whatever of my counsels and thoughts I entrust to him I entrust not to a man but to him in whom he abides, so that he is such a man. For "God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God"; and if he forsakes it, he must cause as much grief as he caused joy while he abode in it. Yet let one who has turned from an intimate friend into an enemy rather seek something to invent in his cunning, and not find something to betray in his anger. And this each person easily achieves, not by concealing what he has done, but by not doing what he would wish to have concealed. God's mercy grants this to the good and godly: that among any friends whatever they may be in the future, they may move freely and securely, not betraying the sins of others entrusted to them, and themselves committing none that they would fear to have betrayed. For when something false is invented by a slanderer, either it is not believed at all, or at least only one's reputation is troubled while one's salvation stays intact; but what is done wickedly is an enemy within, even if it is not published by the talk or quarrel of any intimate. Therefore what prudent man does not see how bearably you too endure the now incredible enmity of one who was once your dearest and most intimate friend, since your conscience consoles you; and how you count among the weapons on the left hand—whatever he boasts or what perhaps some believe—those with which one fights against the devil no less than with those on the right? Yet I would rather he were in some way gentler than that you were in this way better armed. This is a great and sad wonder, to have passed from such friendships to such enmities; it will be a joyful and much greater one to have returned from such enmities to the former harmony.

As I asked your sincerity when you were here, so now too I remind you: please do not find it a burden to send my letter to our holy brother and fellow presbyter Jerome. And so that your charity may know how you too ought to write to him on my behalf, I have sent copies of the letters, both mine to him and his to me. When you have read them, with your holy prudence you will easily see both the moderation that I thought I should keep and his agitation, which I did not fear without cause. Or if I have written something I ought not, or in a way I ought not, address your word in brotherly love not to him about me, but rather to me myself, so that, corrected by it, I may ask him to forgive me, if I myself recognize my fault.

I have received through the deacon Cyprian three letters of yours at once—or rather little books—containing various questions, as you call them, but, as I feel, criticisms of my small works. If I wished to answer them, a book's length would be needed. Still I shall try, as far as I can, not to go beyond the measure of a longish letter and not to delay our brother, who is in a hurry: he demanded letters from me three days before he was to set out, so that I am compelled to blurt out these things, such as they are, almost in marching order, and to answer in a hasty style, not with the maturity of one who writes but with the rashness of one who dictates, which usually turns out not as learning but as chance. For sudden wars throw even the bravest soldiers into confusion, and they are forced to flee before they can snatch up their arms.