Letters 112.17–116.12

Peter, then, pretended to keep the law; but this censurer of Peter boldly observed the legal rites. For there follows in your letter: "For if he celebrated those sacraments because he pretended to be a Jew in order to win them, why did he not also sacrifice with the Gentiles, since to those who were without law he also became as one without law, that he might win them too? Is it not because he did the one as a Jew by birth, and said all this not so as to feign falsely that he was what he was not, but because he felt that he must help them mercifully, as if he himself were laboring under that error—not, that is, with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who suffers with them?" You defend Paul well: he did not pretend to the error of the Jews but was really in error, and did not wish to imitate the lying Peter by concealing what he was out of fear of the Jews, but said with complete freedom that he was a Jew. What novel mercy in the apostle! While he wishes to make Jews Christians, he himself became a Jew. For he could not bring the self-indulgent back to frugality without proving himself self-indulgent, nor mercifully help the wretched, as you say yourself, unless he felt himself wretched. Truly wretched and to be mercifully lamented are those who, by their contentiousness and love of an abolished law, have made the apostle of Christ a Jew. Nor is there much difference between my opinion and yours: for I say that both Peter and Paul, out of fear of the Jewish believers, practiced—or rather pretended to practice—the commandments of the law; while you assert that they did this mercifully, "not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who suffers with them," provided only that it be agreed that, whether from fear or from mercy, they pretended to be what they were not. And the argument you use against us, that he ought to have become a Gentile to the Gentiles if he became a Jew to the Jews, makes rather for us. For just as he was not truly a Jew, so he was not truly a Gentile; and as he was not truly a Gentile, so he was not truly a Jew. He imitates the Gentiles in this, that he accepts uncircumcision in the faith of Christ and allows them without distinction to eat foods that the Jews condemn—not in the worship of idols, as you think; "for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision is anything nor uncircumcision, but the keeping of the commandments of God."

I ask you, then, and beg you again and again, to pardon my little disputation; and if I have gone beyond my usual measure, blame yourself, who forced me to reply and, as with Stesichorus, took away my eyes. And do not think me a teacher of lying, since I follow Christ, who says: "I am the way and the life and the truth"; nor can it be that I, a worshiper of truth, should bow my neck to a lie. And do not stir up against me the rabble of the ignorant, who revere you as a bishop and receive you with the honor of the priesthood when you declaim in church, but make little of me, at the last stage of life, almost decrepit, following the seclusion of a monastery and the countryside; and seek others whom you may teach or censure. For to us, separated from you by such great stretches of sea and land, the sound of your voice barely reaches; and if you happen to write a letter, Italy and Rome will receive it before it is brought to me, to whom it is to be sent.

As for your question in other letters—why my earlier translation of the canonical books has asterisks and small strokes marked in it, and why I afterward published another translation without these signs—with your leave, you seem to me not to understand what you asked. For the former translation is that of the Seventy, and wherever there are small strokes, that is, obeli, it is indicated that the Seventy said more than is found in the Hebrew; and where there are asterisks, that is, shining stars, something has been added by Origen from the edition of Theodotion. There I translated from the Greek; here I rendered from the Hebrew itself what I understood, preserving the truth of the sense rather than, at times, the order of the words. And I wonder how you read the books of the Seventy not pure, as they published them, but corrected—or corrupted—by Origen with obeli and asterisks, and yet do not follow the little translation of a Christian man, especially since what was added Origen took from the edition of a Jew and a blasphemer made after the passion of Christ. Do you want to be a true lover of the Seventy? Do not read what is under the asterisks; rather, scrape it out of your volumes, to prove yourself a supporter of the ancients. But if you do this, you will be forced to condemn all the libraries of the churches; for hardly one or two books will be found that do not have them.

Further, you say that I ought not to have translated after the ancients, and you use a new syllogism: "Either what the Seventy translated was obscure, or it was clear. If obscure, it must be believed that you too could have been deceived in it; if clear, it is plain that they could not have been deceived in it." I answer you with your own argument. All the ancient commentators who have gone before us in the Lord and have interpreted the holy Scriptures interpreted either what was obscure or what was clear. If obscure, how did you dare after them to discuss what they could not explain? If clear, it was superfluous for you to wish to discuss what could not have escaped them—above all in the explanation of the Psalms, which among the Greeks were interpreted in many volumes, first by Origen, second by Eusebius of Caesarea, third by Theodore of Heraclea, fourth by Asterius of Scythopolis, fifth by Apollinaris of Laodicea, sixth by Didymus of Alexandria. Small works by various authors on a few psalms are also in circulation, but we are speaking now of the whole body of the Psalms. Among the Latins, Hilary of Poitiers and Eusebius, bishop of Vercelli, translated Origen and Eusebius, and our Ambrose followed the former of these in some things. Let your prudence answer me why, after so many and such great interpreters, you have held different views in explaining the Psalms. For if the Psalms are obscure, it must be believed that you too could have been deceived in them; if they are clear, it is not believed that the others could have been deceived in them. And so in either case your interpretation will be superfluous; and by this law no one will dare to speak after his predecessors, and whatever one man has taken up, another will not have leave to write about. Rather, it belongs to your kindness to grant to others the indulgence you grant to yourself. For I have not tried so much to abolish the old things—which I have corrected and translated from Greek into Latin for the people of my own language—as to bring into the open the testimonies that have been passed over or corrupted by the Jews, so that our people might know what the Hebrew original contains. If anyone does not like to read it, no one compels him against his will. Let him drink the old wine with relish and despise our new wine, which has been published to explain the earlier writers, so that wherever they are not understood, they may become clearer from ours. What kind of translation should be followed in the holy Scriptures is explained by the book I wrote On the Best Kind of Translating and by all the little prefaces to the divine books that we placed before our edition; to these I think the prudent reader should be referred. And if, as you say, you accept me in the correction of the New Testament, and give as the reason why you accept it that very many who know Greek can judge my work, you ought to have believed in the same integrity in the Old Testament too; for we have not invented anything of our own, but have translated the divine words as we found them among the Hebrews. Wherever you are in doubt, ask the Hebrews.

You will say: "What if the Hebrews either refuse to answer or wish to lie?" Will the whole multitude of the Jews be silent about my translation? Will no one be found who knows the Hebrew language? Or will all imitate those Jews who, you say, were found in a small town of Africa and conspired to slander me? For in your letter you weave a tale of this kind: "A certain brother of ours, a bishop, having begun to have your translation read in the church over which he presides, caused a stir by something in the prophet Jonah that you rendered very differently from what was ingrained in everyone's feelings and memory and had been chanted through so many successive generations. Such a tumult arose among the people, especially as the Greeks accused the passage of being false and inflamed the charge, that the bishop—the city was Oea—was compelled to ask for the testimony of the Jews. And they, whether from ignorance or from malice, answered that the Hebrew manuscripts had what both the Greek and Latin had and said. What more? The man was forced to correct the passage as if it were a mistake, since after a great danger he did not wish to be left without a congregation. From this it seems to us too that you also could sometimes be mistaken in some things."

You say that I translated something wrongly in the prophet Jonah, and that a bishop almost lost his priesthood when the people rioted and shouted over the difference of a single word. And what it is that I translated wrongly you withhold, taking from me the chance to defend myself, lest whatever you say should be refuted by my answer—unless perhaps, as many years ago, the gourd has come into the open, when a Cornelius and Asinius Pollio of that time asserted that I had translated "ivy" instead of "gourd." On this I answered more fully in my commentary on the prophet Jonah; I am content now to say only this: in that place where the Seventy translated "gourd," and Aquila with the rest "ivy," that is, kitton, the Hebrew volume has written ciceion, which the Syrians commonly call ciceia. It is a kind of shrub with broad leaves like a vine leaf, and when it is planted it quickly grows up into a small tree, supporting itself by its own trunk without any of the props of reeds and poles that both gourds and ivy need. If, then, rendering word for word, I had chosen to translate ciceion, no one would understand; if "gourd," I would be saying what is not in the Hebrew; I put "ivy" to agree with the other translators. But if your Jews, as you yourself assert, said out of malice or ignorance that the Hebrew volumes have what is contained in the Greek and Latin manuscripts, it is clear that they either do not know Hebrew letters or wished to lie in order to mock the gourd-men. I ask at the end of my letter that you do not compel a quiet old man, a veteran long since, to go to war and risk his life again. You, who are young and set on the summit of the episcopate, teach the peoples and enrich the roofs of Rome with the new harvests of Africa. It is enough for me to whisper in a corner of the monastery with a poor listener or reader.

At the beginning few are pleased with the judgment of truth; but since the Lord says through the prophet: "And my judgment will go forth as the light," those who are surrounded by the horror of darkness and do not perceive the nature of things with a clear mind are covered with everlasting shame, and learn by the outcome itself that their efforts were in vain. So we too always wished that John, who until recently governed the church of Constantinople, might please God, and we were quite unwilling to believe the causes of his ruin, toward which he was being carried without foresight. But he—to say nothing of his other misdeeds—took the Origenists into his close friendship and advanced very many of them to the priesthood, and by this crime grieved with no small sorrow that man of God of blessed memory, Epiphanius, who shone out among the bishops as a bright star in the world; and so he deserved to hear: "Fallen, fallen is Babylon."

Knowing, then, that the Savior said: "Do not judge by appearance, but judge with right judgment," lest in any way …

That I have been slow to return to your blessedness your book translated into Latin is due to many hindrances that came in between: a sudden raid of the Isaurians, the devastation of Phoenicia and Galilee, the terror of Palestine, especially of the city of Jerusalem, and the building not of books but of walls; besides this, the severity of the winter and an unbearable famine, especially for us, who have been charged with the care of many brothers. Amid these difficulties the translation grew by gainful and, so to speak, stolen work by night, and was already held in loose sheets, when in the days of holy Lent, with the fair copy written and needing only to be checked, I was seized by a very grave illness and came to the threshold of death. By the Lord's mercy and your prayers I was preserved—for this purpose perhaps, that I might fulfil your command and render the most eloquent volume, which you wove from the flowers of the Scriptures, with the same grace with which you wrote it, although weakness of body and grief of mind have blunted the edge of my wits too and slowed my words, which used to run in an easy course, as if by barriers.

We have admired in your work its usefulness for all the churches: that those who are ignorant may learn, taught by the testimonies of the Scriptures, with what reverence they ought to handle holy things and to serve in the ministry of Christ's altar; and that the sacred chalices and holy veils and the other things that belong to the worship of the Lord's passion are not, as empty and senseless things, without holiness, but, from their association with the Lord's body and blood, are to be venerated with the same majesty as his body and blood.

Receive, then, your book—or rather mine, or, to speak more truly, ours; and when you favor me, you will be favoring yourself. For my wits have sweated for you, and I have tried to balance Greek eloquence against the poverty of the Latin tongue. I have not, as skilled translators do, rendered word for word, nor have I counted out the money you gave me in pieces, but I have paid it in equal weight, so that nothing is lacking of the sense even when something is lacking of the words. And I have translated your letter into Latin and placed it before this volume, so that all who read it may know that it was not from rashness and boastfulness, but at the command of your blessedness, that I took up a burden beyond my powers. Whether I have succeeded I leave to your judgment. Certainly, if you criticize my weakness, you will grant pardon to my good will.

When I anxiously asked our holy brother how you were, I was glad to hear that you were well. Again, when I was not merely hoping for but demanding a letter from you, he said that he had set out from Africa without your knowledge. So I return to you the courtesy of a greeting through him, who embraces you with singular love, and at the same time I beg you to forgive my sense of shame, that I could not refuse you when you had long been bidding me to reply. And it was not I who answered you, but cause answered cause. And if it is a fault to have answered—I ask you to hear me patiently—it is a much greater one to have provoked.

But let complaints of this kind be gone; let there be pure brotherhood between us, and from now on let us send each other letters not of questions but of love. The holy brothers who serve the Lord with us greet you warmly. I ask you to greet with my respects the saints who bear Christ's light yoke with you, especially the holy and venerable pope Alypius.

May Christ our God, the Almighty, keep you safe and mindful of me, my lord truly holy and most blessed pope. If you have read my book of explanations on Jonah, I think you will not take up the ridiculous question of the gourd. But if the friend who first attacked me with the sword has been driven back with the pen, it is for your kindness and justice to rebuke the accuser, not the one who answers. In the field of the Scriptures, if you please, let us play without hurting each other.

Some time ago I sent your charity a long letter in answer to yours, which you remember sending through your holy son Asterius, now not only my brother but also my colleague. Whether it has deserved to reach your hands I do not yet know, except that you write through our most sincere brother Firmus that if the one who first attacked you with the sword has been driven back with the pen, it is for my kindness and justice to rebuke the accuser, not the one who answers. From this one very slight indication I conjecture, somehow, that you have read that letter of mine. For in it I lamented that so great a discord had arisen between you two, over whose great friendship, spread by report in every direction, brotherly love used to rejoice. I did this not to rebuke your brotherhood—for I would not dare say that I know of any fault of yours in that matter—but in grief over human misery, in which the permanence of friendships, however great they are, is uncertain even when they are kept by mutual love. But I should have preferred to learn from your reply whether you had granted me the pardon I asked. I want this to be made known to me more plainly, although a certain more cheerful countenance in your letter seems to indicate that I have obtained this too—if, however, it was sent after you read my letter, which does not at all appear in it.

You ask—or rather, in the confidence of love, you bid—that "in the field of the Scriptures we may play without hurting each other." For my part, as far as I am concerned, I would rather we did these things in earnest than in play. If you chose to use this word for its easiness, I confess I look for something greater from the kindness of your powers and from your prudence, so learned and at leisure, so long-practiced, studious, and gifted—a diligence that the Holy Spirit not only grants you but even dictates—so that in great and laborious questions you may help me, not as one playing in the field of the Scriptures, but as one panting on its mountains. But if you thought we should say "let us play" because of the cheerfulness that befits dear friends in discussion, whether the matter we discuss is open and plain or steep and difficult, then teach me this, I beg you: how can we manage, when something happens to trouble us that has not been proved to us—if not because we paid less careful attention, at least because we are slower to understand—and we try to maintain the contrary of what seems right to us, that if we say so with a somewhat freer liberty, we do not fall under suspicion of childish boasting, as if seeking fame for our name by accusing illustrious men; and if we wrap in gentler language something harsh that the need of refutation drew out, so as to make it bearable, we are not judged to be drawing a sword smeared with honey? Unless perhaps the way to avoid both this fault and the suspicion of it is to dispute with a more learned friend in such a way that whatever he has said must be approved, and it is not permitted to offer even a little resistance, at least for the sake of inquiry.

Then indeed one plays without any fear of offense, as in a field; but it would be surprising if we were not being played with. For I—I confess to your charity—have learned to give this fear and honor only to those books of the Scriptures that are now called canonical: that I most firmly believe that none of their authors erred in anything in writing; and if I come upon anything in those writings that seems contrary to truth, I do not doubt that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not grasped what was said, or I have not understood it. Other writers I read in such a way that, however much they excel in holiness and learning, I do not think a thing true because they thought so, but because they have been able to persuade me, either through those canonical authors or by probable reasoning, that it is not inconsistent with the truth. Nor do I suppose, my brother, that you think otherwise; indeed, I say, I do not think that you want your books to be read like those of the prophets or apostles, about whose writings it is wicked to doubt that they are free of all error. Far be this from your devout humility and truthful estimate of yourself; if you were not endowed with it, you would certainly not say: "Would that we might deserve your embraces, and by mutual conversation might either teach or learn something!"

If I believe that you said this of yourself, in view of your life and character, not in pretense and not deceitfully, how much more right is it for me to believe that the apostle Paul did not think otherwise than he wrote, where he says of Peter and Barnabas: "When I saw that they were not walking straightforwardly toward the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all: 'If you, though you are a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how do you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?'" For of whom could I be sure that he does not deceive me in writing or speaking, if the apostle was deceiving his own children, whom he was bearing again in labor until Christ, that is, the truth, should be formed in them? He had prefaced his words to them by saying: "In what I write to you, behold, before God, I do not lie"; and yet was he not writing truthfully, but deceiving them by some pretense of policy, when he said that he had seen Peter and Barnabas not walking straightforwardly toward the truth of the gospel, and had withstood Peter to his face for no other reason than that he was compelling the Gentiles to live like Jews?

"But it is better to believe that the apostle Paul wrote something untrue than that the apostle Peter did something wrongly." If that is so, let us say—God forbid!—that it is better to believe that the Gospel lies than that Christ was denied by Peter; and that the book of Kingdoms lies, rather than that so great a prophet, chosen so excellently by the Lord God, committed adultery in desiring and taking another man's wife, and so horrible a murder in killing her husband. No: rather I will read Holy Scripture, set on the highest and heavenly summit of authority, certain and secure of its truthfulness, and learn truly from it that men were approved or corrected or condemned, rather than let the divine words themselves become suspect to me everywhere because I fear to believe that human deeds are sometimes blameworthy in certain persons of praiseworthy excellence.

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

"It is not credible," you say, "that Paul censured in Peter what Paul himself had done." I am not asking now what he did; I am asking what he wrote. This is what chiefly bears on the question I have taken up: that the truth of the divine Scriptures, committed to memory for building up our faith not by just anyone but by the apostles themselves, and therefore received onto the canonical summit of authority, should remain in every part truthful and beyond doubt. For if Peter did what he ought to have done, Paul lied in saying that he saw him not walking straightforwardly toward the truth of the gospel. For whoever does what he ought to do certainly does rightly; and so he speaks falsely about him who says that he did not do rightly what he knows he ought to have done. But if Paul wrote the truth, it is true that Peter was not then walking straightforwardly toward the truth of the gospel; he was therefore doing what he ought not to have done. And if Paul himself had already done something of the kind, I would rather believe that he too had been corrected and could not neglect correcting his fellow apostle, than that he put something false in his letter—in any letter, and how much more in that one, in which he said beforehand: "In what I write to you, behold, before God, I do not lie."

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

Consider, I beg you, the very words of James: "You see, brother, how many thousands there are in Judea who have believed in Christ, and all of them are zealous for the law. And they have heard of you that you teach the Jews who are among the Gentiles a separation from Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their sons or walk according to the custom. What then is it? The multitude must certainly come together, for they will hear that you have arrived. So do this that we tell you. We have four men who have a vow on them; take them, sanctify yourself with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that what they have heard of you is false, but that you yourself also follow the law, keeping it. But as for the Gentiles who have believed, we have written, judging that they need observe nothing of the kind, except that they keep themselves from what is sacrificed to idols, from blood, and from sexual immorality." It is not obscure, I think, that James gave this advice so that those who, though they had believed in Christ from among the Jews, were still zealous for the law, might know that what they had heard of Paul was false—lest they should think that the things ministered to the fathers through Moses were condemned by the teaching of Christ as sacrilegious and not written at God's command. For this rumor about Paul had been spread not by those who understood in what spirit these things ought then to be observed by the Jewish believers—namely, to commend the divine authority and the prophetic holiness of those sacraments, not to obtain salvation, which was already being revealed in Christ and ministered through the sacrament of baptism—but by those who wished them to be observed as though believers could not have salvation in the gospel without them. For they had found Paul to be a most vehement preacher of grace, and one who taught, directly against their purpose, that a man is justified not by those things but by the grace of Jesus Christ, for the foretelling of whom those shadows were commanded in the law. And so, striving to stir up ill will and persecution against him, they accused him as an enemy of the law and of the divine commandments. He could not more fittingly avoid the ill will of this false accusation than by himself celebrating the things he was thought to condemn as sacrilegious, and so showing that the Jews were not then to be forbidden them as wicked, nor the Gentiles compelled to them as necessary.

For if he really rejected those things, as had been heard of him, and undertook to celebrate them only so that by a pretended action he could conceal his own opinion, James would not have said to him, "and all will know," but "and all will think that what they have heard of you is false"—especially since in Jerusalem itself the apostles had already decreed that no one should compel the Gentiles to live like Jews, but had not decreed that anyone should then forbid the Jews to live like Jews, although Christian teaching did not compel even them any longer. Therefore, if after this decree of the apostles Peter engaged in that pretense at Antioch by which he compelled the Gentiles to live like Jews—since he himself was not compelled, though he was not forbidden, for the sake of commending the oracles of God that were entrusted to the Jews—what wonder is it if Paul pressed him to affirm freely what he remembered having decreed with the other apostles at Jerusalem?

But if, as I rather think, Peter did this before that council at Jerusalem, even so it is no wonder that Paul wanted him not to cover up timidly but to affirm confidently what he already knew Peter thought as he did—whether because he had compared the gospel with him, or because he had heard that Peter had been admonished by God on this matter at the call of Cornelius the centurion, or because he had seen him eating with the Gentiles before those whom he feared came to Antioch. For we do not deny that Peter was already of the same opinion as Paul. So Paul was not then teaching him what was true in this matter, but was rebuking his pretense, by which the Gentiles were being compelled to live like Jews—for no other reason than that all those pretended acts were done as though what those people said were true, who thought that believers could not be saved without the circumcision of the foreskin and the other observances that were shadows of things to come.

So Paul circumcised Timothy in order that it might not seem to the Jews, and especially to his mother's kin, that those who had believed in Christ from the Gentiles detested circumcision as idolatry is to be detested, whereas God commanded the one and Satan persuaded men to the other. And he did not circumcise Titus in order not to give an opening to those who said that believers could not be saved without that circumcision, and who, to deceive the Gentiles, boasted that Paul too held this. He shows this clearly enough where he says: "But not even Titus, who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised, because of false brothers secretly brought in, who slipped in to spy out our freedom, so as to bring us into slavery; to them we did not yield in subjection even for an hour, so that the truth of the gospel might remain with you." Here it is plain what he understood them to be trying to seize on, so that he did not do what he had done in the case of Timothy, which he could do with that freedom by which he showed that those sacraments were neither to be sought as necessary nor to be condemned as sacrilegious.