Letters 116.13–116.32

"But in this discussion," you say, "we must evidently beware of saying, like the philosophers, that some human acts are midway between right action and sin, being counted neither among right actions nor among sins"; and we are pressed with the argument that "to observe the ceremonies of the law cannot be indifferent, but is either good or evil," so that if we call it good we too are compelled to observe them, and if evil we must believe that the apostles observed them not truly but in pretense. For my part, I do not fear for the apostles the example of the philosophers—since they too say something true in their discussion—so much as that of advocates in the courts, when they lie in pleading other men's cases. If the comparison with them was thought fit to be brought in, in the very exposition of the Epistle to the Galatians, to support the pretense of Peter and Paul, why should I fear with you the name of the philosophers? They are foolish not because everything they say is false, but because they trust in very many falsehoods, and, where they are found to say true things, they are strangers to the grace of Christ, who is truth itself.

But why should I not say that those precepts of the old sacraments are neither good, since men are not justified by them—for they are shadows foretelling the grace by which we are justified—nor yet evil, since they were commanded by God, suited to the time and the persons? For I am helped also by the prophetic saying in which God says that he gave that people "precepts that were not good." Perhaps the reason he did not say "evil" but only "not good" is that they are not such that by them people become good, or without them do not become good. I should like your kind sincerity to teach me whether some holy man of the East, when he comes to Rome, fasts in pretense on the sabbath, apart from the day of the Easter vigil. If we say that this is evil, we shall condemn not only the Roman church but also many churches near it and some further away, where the same custom is held and remains. But if we think it evil not to fast on the sabbath, with what rashness shall we accuse so many churches of the East and by far the greater part of the Christian world! Do you agree that we should call this something midway, which is nevertheless acceptable to one who does it not in pretense but out of fitting fellowship and observance? And yet we read nothing about this commanded to Christians in the canonical books. How much less do I dare call evil what I cannot deny God commanded, by the very Christian faith by which I have learned that I am justified not by that, but by the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

I say, then, that the circumcision of the foreskin and other things of this kind were given by God to the former people through the covenant called old, to signify future things that were to be fulfilled through Christ. When these came, those things remained for Christians only to be read, for understanding the prophecy that had gone before, but not to be done as necessary, as if the revelation of faith, which they signified was to come, still had to be awaited. But although they were not to be imposed on the Gentiles, they ought not for that reason to have been taken away from the custom of the Jews as if detestable and damnable. Gradually and little by little, then—while the preaching of the grace of Christ was at its height, by which alone believers were to know that they are justified and saved, not by those shadows of things formerly to come, which were then coming and present—so that, in the calling of those Jews whom the bodily presence of the Lord and the apostolic times had found in this state, the whole practice of the shadows might be brought to an end, it was enough for its commendation that it should not be shunned as detestable and like idolatry, but that it should make no further progress, lest it be thought necessary, as though salvation came from it or could not be without it. This is what the heretics thought who, wishing to be both Jews and Christians, could be neither Jews nor Christians. You were most kindly pleased to warn me to beware of their opinion, although I have never held it. Peter, out of fear, had fallen not into agreement with this opinion but into pretense of it, so that Paul wrote most truly of him that he had seen him not walking straightforwardly toward the truth of the gospel, and said to him most truly that he was compelling the Gentiles to live like Jews. Paul certainly was not compelling them, since he observed those old things truly, where it was needed, to show that they were not to be condemned, while earnestly preaching that believers are saved not by them but by the revealed grace of faith, so as not to compel anyone to take them up as necessary. So I believe that the apostle Paul did all those things truly; and yet now I neither compel nor permit anyone who has become a Christian from Judaism to celebrate such things truly—just as you, who think that Paul pretended to do them, neither compel nor permit such a person to pretend them.

Or do you want me too to say that this is the sum of the question—or rather of your opinion: that after the gospel of Christ the Jewish believers do well if they offer the sacrifices that Paul offered, if they circumcise their sons, if they keep the sabbath, as Paul did in the case of Timothy and as all the Jews observed—provided only that they do these things in pretense and deceitfully? If this is so, we slip no longer into the heresy of Ebion or of those commonly called Nazarenes, or into any other old heresy, but into some new one, which would be the more pernicious because it comes not from error but from a deceitful purpose and will. But suppose you answer, to clear yourself of this opinion, that the apostles did well at that time to pretend these things, so that the weak might not be offended—the many Jews who had believed and did not yet understand that these things were to be rejected—but that now, when the teaching of Christian grace has been established through so many nations, and it has also been established, through the reading of the law and the prophets in all the churches of Christ, how these things are recited to be understood, not observed, anyone who wished to do them in pretense would be mad. Why then may I not say that the apostle Paul and other Christians of right faith ought at that time, by observing those old sacraments for a little while, to commend them truly, lest those observances of prophetic meaning, kept by the most devout fathers, should be thought to be detested by their descendants as diabolical sacrileges? For now that faith had come—the faith formerly foretold by those observances and revealed after the death and resurrection of the Lord—they had lost, as it were, the life of their function. Yet, like the dead bodies of kinsmen, they had in a way to be escorted to burial, not in pretense but with reverence, and not abandoned at once or thrown out to the slanders of enemies as to the bites of dogs. So now, if any Christian, even one from among the Jews, wishes to celebrate them in the same way, digging up ashes laid to rest, he will be no devout escort or bearer of the body but an impious violator of the grave.

I admit, indeed, that in what my letter contains—that Paul undertook to celebrate the sacraments of the Jews when he was already an apostle of Christ, in order to teach that they were not harmful to those who wished to keep them as they had received them from their parents through the law—I did not add "at least at that time when the grace of faith was first revealed"; for then this was not harmful. But as time went on, those observances were to be abandoned by all Christians, lest, if they were then practiced, what God commanded his people through Moses should not be distinguished from what the unclean spirit instituted in the temples of demons. So my negligence in not adding this is more to be blamed than your reproof. Yet long before I received your letter, when writing against Faustus the Manichaean, I explained the same passage, though briefly, and did not leave this out there; your kindness can read it, if you do not disdain to, and you can be assured by our dearest friends, through whom I have now sent this letter, in whatever way you wish, that I dictated it earlier. And believe me about my mind—I ask it by the right of love, speaking before God—that it has never seemed to me that Christians who have come from Judaism ought even now to celebrate those old sacraments with any feeling or intention whatever, or that it is in any way permitted them. For I have always held this view of Paul since his letters became known to me, just as it does not seem to you that anyone should pretend these things at this time, although you believe the apostles did so.

Therefore, just as you speak to the contrary, and, though the world protests, as you write, declare with a free voice that the ceremonies of the Jews are both harmful and deadly to Christians, and that whoever observes them, whether from the Jews or from the Gentiles, has fallen headlong into the pit of the devil, so I entirely confirm this statement of yours and add: whoever observes them, not only truly but even in pretense, has fallen headlong into the pit of the devil. What more do you want? But just as you distinguish the pretense of the apostles from the practice of this present time, so I distinguish the apostle Paul's truthful conduct in all these things then from any observance of Jewish ceremonies at this present time, even one that is not at all pretended; for then it was to be approved, now it is to be detested. So, although we have read that "the law and the prophets were until John the Baptist," and that the Jews sought to kill Christ because "he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal to God," and that "we have received grace for grace," and that "the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ," and that it was promised through Jeremiah that God would give a new covenant to the house of Judah, not according to the covenant which he made with their fathers—yet I do not think that the Lord himself was circumcised by his parents in pretense. Or if his age did not allow him to forbid this, neither do I think that he spoke in pretense to the leper, whom certainly he himself, and not that observance commanded through Moses, had cleansed: "Go and offer for yourself the sacrifice that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." Nor did he go up to the feast in pretense—so far from going for show before men that he went up not openly but in secret.

"But the same apostle said: 'Behold, I Paul say to you that if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing.'" Did he deceive Timothy, then, and make Christ profit him nothing? Or, because it was done in pretense, did it therefore do no harm? But he himself did not put this in; he did not say "if you are circumcised truly," any more than "in pretense," but he said without any exception: "If you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing." So just as you wish to make room here for your opinion, wanting "unless in pretense" to be understood, so I do not shamelessly demand that you let us too understand there that "if you are circumcised" was said to those who wished to be circumcised because they thought they could not otherwise be saved in Christ. Whoever was then circumcised with this mind, this will, this intention, Christ profited him nothing at all, as he says plainly elsewhere: "For if righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nothing." This is also declared by what you yourself quoted: "You are cut off from Christ, you who are justified in the law; you have fallen from grace." So he rebukes those who believed that they were justified in the law, not those who observed those legal rites in honor of him by whom they were commanded, understanding both that they were commanded for the purpose of foretelling the truth and how long they ought to last. Hence also what he says: "If you are led by the Spirit, you are no longer under the law"—from which, as you infer, it appears that "whoever is under the law, not by policy, as you think our predecessors held, but really, as I understand it, does not have the Holy Spirit."

It seems to me a great question what it is to be under the law in the way the apostle blames. For I do not think he says this because of circumcision, or of those sacrifices that were then offered by the fathers and are not now offered by Christians, and other things of that kind, but also because of this very thing the law says: "You shall not covet," which we certainly admit that Christians ought to observe, and to preach especially with the light of the gospel. He says that "the law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good." Then he adds: "Did what is good, then, become death to me? By no means. But sin, that it might be shown to be sin, worked death in me through what is good, so that sin might become sinful beyond measure through the commandment." What he says here, that sin becomes sinful beyond measure through the commandment, he says elsewhere: "The law came in so that the offense might abound; but where the offense abounded, grace abounded all the more." And elsewhere, when he had been speaking above of the dispensation of grace, that it justifies, he says, as if asking: "Why then the law?" And he at once answered this question: "It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise was made." So he says that those are under the law to their condemnation whom the law makes guilty because they do not fulfil the law, while, not understanding the benefit of grace, they presume with proud self-exaltation to do God's commandments as if by their own strength. "For love is the fulfilment of the law"; and "the love of God has been poured out in our hearts," not through ourselves, but "through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." But a long discourse, and perhaps a volume of its own, would be needed to explain this sufficiently. If, then, the law's saying, "You shall not covet," holds human weakness guilty under it, unless it is helped by God's grace, and condemns the sinner as a transgressor rather than setting him free, how much less could those things that were commanded for the sake of signifying—circumcision and the rest, which had to be abolished as the revelation of grace became more widely known—justify anyone! Yet they were not for that reason to be shunned like the diabolical sacrileges of the Gentiles, even when the grace itself that had been foretold by such shadows had begun to be revealed. Rather they were to be permitted for a little while, especially to those who had come from the people to whom they were given; but afterward, as if buried with honor, they were to be abandoned irrevocably by all Christians.

But what does it mean, I ask you, when you say, "not by policy, as our predecessors held"? Either this is what I call a "useful lie," so that this "policy" is a duty, as it were, of lying honorably; or I simply do not see what else it is—unless perhaps by adding the name "policy" a lie comes not to be a lie. If that is absurd, why do you not say openly that a useful lie is to be defended? Unless perhaps the name troubles you, because the word "duty" is not so common in church books—though our Ambrose did not fear it, who chose to call certain books of his, full of useful precepts, On Duties. Is someone to be blamed, I ask you, if he lies out of duty, but approved if he lies by policy? Let whoever thinks this lie where he pleases—for this too is a great question, whether it is ever the part of a good man, indeed of a Christian man, to lie: men to whom it was said, "Let your speech be yes, yes; no, no," and who hear with faith, "You will destroy all who speak a lie."

But, as I said, that is another and a great question. Let whoever thinks so choose where he will lie, provided only that it is unshakably believed and defended that lying is wholly absent from the authors who wrote the holy Scriptures, and above all the canonical ones; lest the stewards of Christ, of whom it is said, "Here it is required of stewards that one be found faithful," should think they have learned something great in faithfully lying for the stewardship of truth—when "faith" itself, in the Latin language, is said to be so called by some because "what is said is done." And where what is said is done, there is certainly no room for lying. The apostle Paul, then, a faithful steward, undoubtedly shows us faithfulness in writing, because he was a steward of truth, not of falsehood. And therefore he wrote truly that he had seen Peter not walking straightforwardly toward the truth of the gospel and had withstood him to his face because he was compelling the Gentiles to live like Jews. And Peter himself received what Paul did usefully, with the freedom of love, with the devotion of holy and kind humility; and so he gave to posterity a rarer and holier example—that they should not disdain, if ever they left the straight path, to be corrected even by juniors—than Paul did, by which the lesser might confidently dare to withstand the greater for the defense of the truth of the gospel, while keeping brotherly love. For though it is better not to turn aside from the road in anything than to turn aside in something, it is nevertheless much more wonderful and praiseworthy to accept a corrector willingly than boldly to correct one who strays. The praise, then, of just freedom in Paul and of holy humility in Peter, as it seems to me in my small measure, should rather have been defended against the slanderer Porphyry than that he should be given a greater occasion for disparagement, by which he could far more bitingly accuse Christians of either writing their letters deceitfully or carrying out the sacraments of their God deceitfully.

You demand that I show you at least one person whose opinion I have followed in this matter, since you have named so many who went before you in what you maintain, and you ask that, if I censure you as erring in this, I allow you to err with such men. I confess I have read none of them. But since they are about six or seven, you yourself undermine the authority of four of them. For the Laodicean, whose name you do not mention, you say has lately left the church; Alexander you call an old heretic; and Origen and Didymus I read censured by you in your more recent works, and not moderately nor on moderate questions, although earlier you praised Origen wonderfully. I think, then, that you yourself will not allow yourself to err with these—although this is said as if they had not erred in this opinion; for who would wish to err with just anyone? Three therefore remain: Eusebius of Emesa, Theodore of Heraclea, and John, whom you mention a little later, who until recently governed the church of Constantinople in the rank of bishop.

Further, if you look into or recall what our Ambrose thought on this, and likewise our Cyprian, you will perhaps find that we too have not lacked people to follow in what we maintain—although, as I said a little before, I owe this free-born servitude only to the canonical Scriptures, following them alone in such a way that I do not doubt that their writers erred in nothing at all in them and set down nothing deceitfully. So, when I look for a third, so that I too may set three against three, I could easily find one, I think, if I had read much. But for all these, or rather above all these, the apostle Paul himself comes to my aid. To him I flee; to him I appeal from all the commentators on his letters who think otherwise. I question him and ask him about what he wrote to the Galatians—that he had seen Peter not walking straightforwardly toward the truth of the gospel and had withstood him to his face because by that pretense he was compelling the Gentiles to live like Jews—whether he wrote the truth or perhaps lied by some politic falsehood. And I hear him, a little earlier, at the beginning of the same narrative, crying out to me with solemn voice: "In what I write to you, behold, before God, I do not lie."

Let those who think otherwise forgive me: I believe so great an apostle, swearing in and for his own letters, rather than any most learned man arguing about another's letters. Nor do I fear to be said to defend Paul in such a way that "he did not pretend to the error of the Jews, but was really in error." For he was neither pretending to an error, since with apostolic freedom, as befitted that time, he commended those old sacraments by practicing them where it was needed, as having been established not by Satan's cunning to deceive men but by God's providence to foretell future things prophetically; nor was he really in the error of the Jews, since he not only knew but also preached earnestly and sharply that those were in error who thought that these things should be imposed on the Gentiles, or were necessary for the justification of any of the faithful.

As for my saying that he became as a Jew to the Jews and as a Gentile to the Gentiles "not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who suffers with them," you seem to me to have paid too little attention to the way I said it—or perhaps I could not explain it well enough. For I did not say it because he pretended those things out of mercy, but because he did not pretend the things he did that were like the Jews, just as he did not pretend those that were like the Gentiles—which you too mentioned, and in this, I gratefully admit, you helped me. For when I had asked you in my letter how he can be thought to have become as a Jew to the Jews because he took up the sacraments of the Jews in pretense, when he also became as a Gentile to the Gentiles and yet did not take up the sacrifices of the Gentiles in pretense, you answered that he became as a Gentile to the Gentiles in that he received the uncircumcised and allowed them without distinction to eat foods that the Jews condemn. Here I ask whether he did this too in pretense. If that is most absurd and most false, then he also did those things in which he conformed to the custom of the Jews with prudent freedom, not with servile necessity, or—what is more unworthy—by a deceitful rather than a faithful policy.

For to believers and to those who have known the truth, as he himself testifies—unless he is deceiving here too—"every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be rejected that is received with thanksgiving." So for Paul himself, not only a man but a most faithful steward, not only a knower but also a teacher of the truth, every creature of God in the way of food was certainly good, not in pretense but truly. Why then, taking up nothing of the sacred rites and ceremonies of the Gentiles in pretense, but thinking and teaching the truth about food and the foreskin, did he become as a Gentile to the Gentiles, and yet could not become as a Jew to the Jews except by taking up the sacraments of the Jews in pretense? Why did he keep the truthful faith of his stewardship toward the grafted wild olive, and hold up some veil of politic pretense before the natural branches, which were set not outside but in the tree? Why, having become as a Gentile to the Gentiles, does he teach what he thinks and think what he does, but, having become as a Jew to the Jews, shut one thing up in his breast and put forth another in words, deeds, and writings? Far be it from us to think this. For to both he owed "love from a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned." And therefore "he became all things to all, that he might win all," not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who suffers with them—that is, not by deceitfully doing all the evils men do, but by taking care, with the diligence of merciful medicine, of all the evils of all others as if they were his own.

So when he did not at all refuse to perform those sacraments of the old covenant himself, he was not deceiving out of mercy; he was not deceiving at all, and in this way, by commending them as commanded by the Lord God until an appointed time of dispensation, he distinguished them from the sacrilegious rites of the Gentiles. But he became as a Jew to the Jews, "not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who suffers with them," when he longed to free them from that error by which they either refused to believe in Christ or thought they could be cleansed from sins and saved through their old priesthoods and the observance of ceremonies—longed to free them as if he himself were held by that error; loving his neighbor, certainly, as himself, and doing for others what he would wish others to do for him if he needed it. When the Lord had given this counsel, he added: "For this is the law and the prophets."

This affection of one who suffers with others he commands in the same Epistle to the Galatians, saying: "If a man is overtaken in any fault, you who are spiritual, instruct such a one in a spirit of gentleness, looking to yourself, lest you too be tempted." See whether he did not say: become as he is, so that you may win him—not, certainly, so that one should commit the fault itself deceitfully or pretend to have it, but so that in another's fault one should consider what could happen to oneself too, and so help the other mercifully as one would wish to be helped by another; that is, "not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who suffers with them." So to the Jew, so to the Gentile, so to any person set in some error or sin, Paul—not pretending to be what he was not, but suffering with him, because he could have been so, as one who thought of himself as a man—"became all things to all, that he might win all."

Look at yourself for a moment, I beg you, if you please—at yourself, I say, in your dealings with me—and recall, or, if you have them written down, reread your words in that shorter letter you sent me through our brother Cyprian, now my colleague: how truthful, how brotherly, how full of loving affection it was when, having complained that I had committed certain offenses against you, you gravely added: "In this friendship is hurt, in this the rights of close relationship are violated. Let us not seem to contend like children and give our supporters or detractors material for dispute." These words of yours I feel were spoken not only from the heart but also with a kindly heart, to advise me. Finally you add—what would have been evident even if you had not added it—and say: "I write this because I desire to love you purely and as a Christian, and not to keep anything in my mind that differs from my lips." O holy man, loved by me with a truthful heart, as God sees my soul: this very thing that you put in your letter, which I do not doubt you have shown toward me, I believe the apostle Paul showed altogether in his letters—not to one man, but to Jews and Greeks and all the nations, his children, whom he had begotten in the gospel and whom he was in labor to bring forth, and then to so many thousands of Christian believers of later times, for whose sake that letter was committed to memory—so that he kept nothing in his mind that differed from his lips.

Certainly you too became as I am, "not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who suffers with another," when you thought that I should no more be left in the fault into which you judged I had slipped than you would wish to be left if you had slipped in the same way. So, while I thank you for your kind mind toward me, I also ask that you not be angry with me because, when some things in your works troubled me, I told you of my concern. I wish all to observe toward me what I have myself observed toward you: that whatever they think blameworthy in my writings, they should neither shut it up in a deceitful breast nor censure it before others while keeping silent before me. It is rather by this, I think, that friendship is hurt and the rights of close relationship violated. For I do not know whether those friendships should be thought Christian in which the common proverb, "Compliance breeds friends, truth breeds hatred," has more force than the church's saying: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend, rather than the voluntary kisses of an enemy."

So let us rather teach our dearest friends, who most sincerely favor our labors, with all the earnestness we can, that they may know it is possible for something to be said against each other in dear friends' discussion without love itself being lessened, and without truth, which is owed to friendship, breeding hatred—whether what is said in contradiction is true, or, whatever it is, is said with a truthful heart, keeping nothing in the mind that differs from the lips. Let our brothers, then, your intimates, to whom you bear witness that they are vessels of Christ, believe that it was done against my will, and that no small grief over it is in my heart, that my letter came into many hands before it could reach you, to whom it was written. How this happened would be long to tell and, unless I am mistaken, superfluous, since it is enough—if I am believed in this at all—that it was not done with the intention that is supposed, and that it was not at all my will or arrangement or consent or even thought that it should happen. If they do not believe what I say with God as witness, I have nothing more I can do. Yet far be it from me to believe that they suggest these things to your holiness with malicious intent, to stir up enmity between us—may the mercy of the Lord our God turn it away from us!—but rather that, without any intention to harm, they easily suspect human faults in a human being. This is what it is right for me to believe of them, if they are vessels of Christ made not for dishonor but for honor, and set by God in a great house for good work. But if after this attestation of mine, should it come to their notice, they choose to go on doing so, you too see how wrongly they would be acting.