Letters 122.1–123.4

That I, a stranger, dare to write to a stranger is the doing of the entreaty of Christ’s holy handmaid Hedybia and of my holy daughter Artemia, your wife—or rather, your sister, once your wife, and your fellow servant. Not at all content with her own salvation, she sought yours before in your homeland and now seeks it in the holy places, desiring to imitate the kindness of the apostles Andrew and Philip, each of whom, once found by Christ, longs to find, the one his brother Simon, the other his friend Nathanael; so that the first may be found worthy to hear: “You are Simon son of John; you shall be called Cephas,” which is interpreted Peter; and the other, “gift of God”—for that is what Nathanael means in our language—may be lifted up by the testimony of Christ speaking to him: “Behold, truly an Israelite in whom there is no guile.” Lot too once wished to save his wife together with his daughters, and, bursting half-burnt from the fire of Sodom and Gomorrah, to bring her out; but she was held fast, bound by her former vices. Her fearful despair, looking back, is condemned with the everlasting label of unbelief, while his burning faith, in exchange for one lost woman, sets free the whole city of Zoar. Then, when he left the valleys and darkness of Sodom and climbed to the mountains, the sun rose for him in Zoar, which is interpreted “little,” so that Lot’s little faith, since it could not preserve the greater things, might at least preserve the lesser. For one who had once lived in Gomorrah and in error could not at once reach the noonday, in which Abraham, the friend of the Lord, received God with the angels, and Joseph feeds his brothers in Egypt, and the bridegroom hears from the bride: “Where do you pasture, where do you lie down at noon?” Samuel once mourned for Saul, because he would not treat the wounds of pride with the medicine of repentance; and Paul grieved over the Corinthians, who were unwilling to wash away the stains of sexual immorality with tears. Hence Ezekiel too devours a book written within and without with song and lamentation and woe: song over the praise of the righteous, lamentation over the penitent, woe over those of whom it is written: “When the wicked man comes into the depth of evils, he despises.” Isaiah also points to them, saying: “The Lord of hosts called in that day to weeping and lamentation, to baldness and girding with sackcloth; but they made joy and gladness, slaying calves and killing sheep to eat flesh, and saying: Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.” Of them Ezekiel also speaks: “And you, son of man, say to the house of Israel: Thus you have spoken, saying: Our errors and our iniquities are upon us, and we waste away in them; how then can we be saved? Say to them: As I live, says the Lord, I do not desire the death of the wicked, but that he turn from his way.” And again: “Turn back, turn back from your way; why will you die, O house of Israel?” Nothing so offends God as clinging to what is worse out of despair of what is better, although despair itself is also a sign of unbelief. For one who despairs of salvation does not think there will be a judgment; if he feared it, he would surely prepare himself for the judge by good works. Let us hear God speaking through Jeremiah: “Turn your foot from the rough way and your throat from thirst,” and again: “Shall he who falls not rise again, or he who has turned away not return?” And through Isaiah: “When you have turned and groaned, then you will be saved and will know where you have been.” We cannot know the evils of sickness until health has followed; vices show how much good virtue holds, and light becomes clearer by comparison with darkness. Ezekiel too, in the same words because by the same Spirit, says: “Turn and come back from your iniquities, O house of Israel, and your ungodliness shall not be a torment to you. Cast away all your ungodliness with which you have acted ungodly against me, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. And why will you die, O house of Israel? For I do not desire the death of the sinner, says the Lord.” Hence also in what follows he says: “As I live, says the Lord, I do not desire the death of the sinner, but that he turn from his way and live,” so that the unbelieving mind may not despair of the promise of good things, and the soul once resigned to perdition may not neglect to treat a wound that it thinks can never be healed. That is why he says he swears: so that, if we do not believe God when he promises, we may at least believe him when he swears for our salvation. For this reason the righteous man also prays and says: “Turn us, O God our Savior, and turn away your anger from us,” and again: “Lord, in your good will you gave strength to my beauty; you turned away your face and I was troubled.” For after I exchanged the foulness of my sins for the beauty of virtues, you strengthened my weakness by your grace; and may I hear you promising: “I will pursue my enemies and overtake them, and I will not turn back until they fail,” so that I, who used to flee from you and was your enemy, may be overtaken by your hand. Do not cease pursuing until I fail from my most wicked way and return to my first husband, who gave me my linen and oil and fine flour and fed me with the richest food. He fenced and shut off my most wicked ways for this reason, that I might find the way that says in the Gospel: “I am the way and the life and the truth.” Hear the prophet saying: “Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. Going, they went and wept, carrying their seed; but coming, they shall come with rejoicing, carrying their sheaves”; and speak with him: “I have labored in my groaning; every night I will wash my bed, I will water my couch with my tears”; and again: “As the deer longs for the springs of water, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul has thirsted for God, the strong and living; my tears have become my bread day and night”; and in another place: “O God, my God, I keep watch for you from the dawn. My soul has thirsted for you; how many ways my flesh also for you. In a land desert and pathless and waterless, so have I appeared before you in the sanctuary.” Though my soul has thirsted for you, I have sought you much more with the labor of my flesh, and I could not appear before you in the sanctuary unless I first dwelt in a land deserted by vices, pathless to the hostile powers, and without the moisture and flow of any lust. The Lord too wept over the city of Jerusalem because it had not repented, and Peter washed away his threefold denial with the bitterness of tears and fulfilled the prophetic saying: “My eyes have poured down streams of water.” Jeremiah also laments the people that does not repent, saying: “Who will give water to my head and a fountain of tears to my eyes, and I will weep for this people day and night?” Why he laments and weeps he shows in the words that follow: “Do not weep for the dead, nor lament for him; weep with lamentation for him who goes away, for he will return no more.” So we are not to lament the Gentile or the Jew, who have not been in the church and have died once for all—of whom the Savior says: “Leave the dead to bury their own dead”—but those who by crimes and sins go out of the church and, under the condemnation of their vices, refuse ever to return to it. Hence the prophetic word speaks also to churchmen, who are called the walls and towers of the church, saying: “Walls of Zion, shed tears,” fulfilling the apostle’s saying, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep,” so that by your tears you may move the hard hearts of sinners to weeping, lest, persisting in wickedness, they hear: “I planted you a fruitful vine, wholly true; how have you turned into the bitterness of a strange vine?” and again: “They said to a tree, You are my father, and to a stone, You have begotten me; and they turned their backs to me and not their faces.” The sense is: they would not turn to me to repent, but in the hardness of their heart turned their backs on me to insult me. For this reason the Lord also says to Jeremiah: “Have you seen what the dwelling of Israel has done to me? They went up on every high mountain and under every leafy tree and played the harlot there. And I said, after she had played the harlot in all these things: Return to me; and she did not return.”

O the mercy of God, O our hardness! Even after such great crimes he calls us to salvation, and even so we will not turn to better things. “If a wife,” he says, “leaves her husband and marries another, and afterward wishes to return to him, will he receive her and not loathe her?” In its place there is written, according to the Hebrew truth, what is not found in the Greek and Latin copies: “And you have left me; yet turn, and I will receive you, says the Lord.” Isaiah too speaks to the same effect in almost the same words: “Turn, you who devise deep and wicked counsel, sons of Israel. Return to me and I will redeem you. I am God, and there is no other besides me; righteous and a Savior, there is none apart from me. Return to me and you will be saved, you who are at the ends of the earth. Remember these things and groan, and repent, you who go astray. Turn in heart and remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other besides me.” Joel also writes: “Turn to me with all your heart, with fasting and tears and lamentation; rend your hearts and not your garments. For the Lord is merciful and compassionate, and repents over evils.” How great his mercies are, and how great—if I may put it so—his excessive and ineffable clemency, let the prophet Hosea teach us, through whom God says: “What shall I do to you, Ephraim? How shall I protect you, Israel? What, I say, shall I do to you? Shall I set you like Admah and like Zeboiim? My heart is turned within me; my repentance is troubled. I will not act according to the anger of my fury.” Hence David too says in a psalm: “In death there is no one who remembers you; and in hell who will confess you?” and in another place: “I made my sin known and did not hide my iniquity. I said: I will declare my iniquity against myself to the Lord; and you forgave the ungodliness of my heart. For this every holy one will pray to you at a fitting time. Yet in a flood of many waters they will not come near him.”

See how great the abundance of weeping is, that it is compared to a flood of waters. Whoever has such tears and says with Jeremiah, “Let not the pupil of my eye be silent,” in him will at once be fulfilled: “Mercy and truth have met each other; righteousness and peace have kissed,” so that if righteousness and truth frighten you, mercy and peace may call you to salvation. The fiftieth psalm shows the whole repentance of a sinner, when David had gone in to Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and, rebuked by the prophesying of Nathan, answered, saying, “I have sinned,” and at once was found worthy to hear: “And the Lord has taken away your sin.” For he had joined murder to adultery; and yet, turned to tears, he says: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your great mercy, and according to the multitude of your compassions blot out my iniquity.” A great sin needed great mercy. Hence he adds and says: “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin, for I acknowledge my iniquity, and my offense is ever before me. Against you only have I sinned”—for as king he feared no one else—“and done evil before you, that you may be justified in your words and prevail when you are judged.” For God has shut up all things under sin, that he may have mercy on all. And he made such progress that he who was lately a sinner and a penitent passed over into a teacher and says: “I will teach the wicked your ways, and the ungodly will be turned to you.” For “confession and beauty are before him,” so that one who has confessed his sins and said, “My scars have become corrupt and festered because of my foolishness,” exchanges the foulness of his wounds for the beauty of health. For “he who hides his iniquity will not prosper.” Ahab, most wicked of kings, took possession of Naboth’s vineyard by blood, and together with Jezebel, joined to him not so much in marriage as in cruelty, he is rebuked by Elijah’s reproach: “Thus says the Lord: You have killed and taken possession.” And again: “In the place where the dogs licked the blood of Naboth, there they will lick your blood,” and: “The dogs will eat Jezebel before the walls of Jezreel.” When Ahab heard this, he tore his garments and put sackcloth on his flesh and fasted and slept in haircloth. And the word of the Lord came to Elijah, saying: “Because Ahab has reverenced my face, I will not bring the evil in his days.” The crime of Ahab and Jezebel was one; and yet, because Ahab turned to repentance, the punishment is deferred to his descendants, while Jezebel, persisting in her crime, is condemned by present judgment. The Lord too says in the Gospel: “The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah.” “For I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” The drachma is lost and yet is found in the dung; the ninety-nine sheep are left in the wilderness, and the one sheep that had strayed is carried back on the shepherd’s shoulders. Hence there is joy among the angels over one sinner who repents. How great a blessing, that the heavenly beings exult in our salvation! Of this it is said: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.” There is no interval between: death and life are opposites, and yet they are joined by repentance. The prodigal son had squandered his whole substance and, far from his father, barely held off starvation with the food of pigs. He returns to his parent; the fatted calf is killed for him; he receives the robe and the ring, so that he may take back the garment of Christ which he had long since defiled and be found worthy to hear: “Let your garments always be white”; and, having received again the seal of God, he may cry out to the Lord: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you,” and, reconciled by a kiss, say to him: “The light of your countenance is sealed upon us, O Lord.” “The righteousness of the righteous will not deliver him on whatever day he sins, and the iniquity of the wicked will not harm him on whatever day he turns.” He judges each one as he finds him; he does not consider the past but the present, provided that old crimes are changed by a new conversion. “The righteous man falls seven times and rises again.” If he falls, how is he righteous? If he is righteous, how does he fall? But he does not lose the name of righteous who always rises again through repentance. And not only seven times but seventy times seven are sins forgiven to the one who offends, if he turns to repentance. He to whom more is forgiven loves more. A harlot washes the Savior’s feet with tears and wipes them with her hair, and, as a type of the church gathered from the Gentiles, is found worthy to hear: “Your sins are forgiven you.” The righteousness of the Pharisee perishes through pride, and the humility of the tax collector is saved by confession. Through Jeremiah God solemnly declares: “At once I will speak against a nation and a kingdom, to root it up and destroy and ruin it. If that nation repents of its evil, of which I have spoken against it, I too will repent of the evil which I purposed to do to it. And at once I will speak of a nation and a kingdom, to build and to plant it. If it does evil in my sight so as not to hear my voice, I will repent of the good which I said I would do to it.” And at once he adds: “Behold, I am shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Let each one turn from his evil way, and make straight your ways and your pursuits.” “But they said: We have despaired; for we will go after our own thoughts, and each of us will do the perversity of his evil heart.” Simeon the righteous says in the Gospel: “Behold, this one is set for the fall and the rising of many”—the fall, that is, of sinners, and the rising of those who repent. The apostle writes to the Corinthians: “Sexual immorality is reported among you, and such sexual immorality as is not found even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father’s wife. And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, so that he who has done this deed might be removed from among you.” And in the second letter to the same, lest a man of that kind be swallowed up by excessive sorrow, he calls him back and begs them to confirm their love toward him, so that he who had perished through incest might be preserved through repentance. “For no one is clean from sin, not even if his life be but one day; and the years of his life are numbered.” “Even the stars themselves are not clean in his sight, and against his angels he has devised something perverse.” If there is sin in heaven, how much more on earth! If there is fault in those who lack bodily temptation, how much more in us, who are surrounded by frail flesh and say with the apostle: “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death?” For good does not dwell in our flesh, and we do not do what we will but what we do not will, so that the soul desires one thing and the flesh is compelled to do another. But if some are called righteous in the Scriptures, and not only righteous but righteous in the sight of God, they are called righteous according to that righteousness of which it was said above, “The righteous man falls seven times and rises again,” and according to the saying, “The iniquity of the wicked will not harm him on whatever day he turns.” Indeed, Zechariah too, the father of John, who is written to be righteous, sinned in not believing and was at once condemned to silence; and Job, who at the beginning of his book is written to be righteous and spotless and blameless, is afterward shown to be a sinner both by God’s word and by his own confession. If Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the prophets and apostles too, were by no means without sin, if the purest wheat had chaff mixed with it, what can be said of us, of whom it is written: “What has the chaff to do with the wheat? says the Lord.” And yet the chaff is reserved for the fire to come, and in this age the tares are mixed with the crops of wheat, until he comes who has the winnowing fan in his hand and will clear his threshing floor, to gather the wheat into the barns and burn the refuse in the fire of Gehenna.

All these things I wished to gather into one place, as if running through the loveliest meadows of the Scriptures, and to weave for you out of the fairest flowers a crown of repentance to set upon your head, so that you may take the wings of a dove and fly and be at rest, and be reconciled to the most merciful Father. Your former wife, now your sister and fellow servant, told me that, in keeping with the apostle’s command, you abstained by consent from the work of marriage in order to give yourselves to prayer; but that your steps, as if set on a heaving sea, wavered again—or rather, to speak more plainly, slipped; whereas she heard from the Lord with Moses, “But you, stand here with me,” and said of the Lord, “He set my feet upon a rock”; that your house, which had no solid foundations of faith, afterward fell in the devil’s whirlwind, while hers stands firm in the Lord and does not refuse you its hospitality, so that you, once joined to her in body, may now be united in spirit—for “he who cleaves to the Lord is one spirit”; and that when the madness of the barbarians and threatening captivity were separating you, you promised on oath that you would follow her as she went to the holy places, either at once or later, and would save your soul, which you seemed to have lost through negligence. Pay, then, what you pledged in the presence of the Lord. The life of mortals is uncertain; lest you be snatched away before you fulfil your promise, imitate her whom you ought to have taught. For shame! The frailer sex overcomes the world, and the stronger is overcome by the world. “A woman was leader of the deed,” and do you not follow her, when in her salvation you are already a candidate for the faith? But if the remnants of your property hold you—so that, forsooth, you may watch the deaths of friends and fellow citizens and the ruins of cities and country houses—at least amid the evils of captivity, the fierce faces of the enemy, and the endless shipwrecks of your province, hold fast to the plank of repentance and remember your fellow servant, who sighs daily for your salvation and does not despair of it. You wander in your homeland—or rather not your homeland, since you have lost your homeland; she, on your behalf, in the venerable places of the resurrection and the cross and the cradle of the Lord and Savior, where he wailed as a little child, remembers your name and draws you to herself by her prayers, so that, if not by your own merit, you may at least be saved by her faith. A paralytic once lay on a bed, and was so loosened in all his limbs that he could move neither his feet to walk nor his hands to pray; and yet he was brought by others and restored to his former health, so that he who had been carried by the bed now carried the bed. So too your fellow servant offers you, absent in body but present in faith, to the Lord and Savior, and says with the Canaanite woman: “My daughter is grievously vexed by a demon.” For I shall rightly call your soul the daughter of her soul, a soul that knows no difference of sex, because she invites you, like a little child still at the breast and not yet able to take solid food, to the milk of infancy and shows you a nurse’s nourishment, so that you can say with the prophet: “I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commandments.”

On an old road we are looking for a new path, and in old and well-worn material we are devising a fresh elegance of art, so that the things may be neither the same and yet the same. There is one road, and many shortcuts for arriving where you wish. I have often written to widows, and in exhorting them, repeating many examples from the holy Scriptures, have woven the varied flowers of testimonies into one crown of chastity. Now my word is to Geruchia, who received her name by a kind of prophecy of things to come and by the help of God presiding over her, and around whom stands a noble company of women approved in Christ: her grandmother, her mother and her aunt. Of these, her grandmother Metronia, persevering as a widow for forty years, has brought back to us Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, from the Gospel; her mother Benigna, now completing the fourteenth year of her widowhood, is surrounded by a hundredfold choir of virgins; and the sister of Celerinus, Geruchia’s father, who nursed her as a little infant and took her at birth into her own lap, bereft of a husband’s comfort for twenty years, teaches her niece what she learned from her own mother.

I have touched on these things briefly to show that my young friend does not bestow monogamy on her family but pays it back as a debt, and that she is not so much to be praised if she grants it as to be cursed by all if she attempts to refuse it—especially since her posthumous son Simplicius bears his father’s name, and there is no excuse of a house left desolate and without an heir, the pretext under which lust sometimes flatters itself, so that what people do out of their own incontinence they appear to do out of a desire for children. But why do I speak as if to one who is hesitating, when I hear that she avoids, under the protection of the church, many suitors from the palace, whom the devil vies to inflame in order to test the chastity of our widow—whom nobility, beauty, youth and wealth make desirable to all—so that the more things there are that assail her chastity, the greater may be the rewards of her victory?

And since, as we set out from harbor, a kind of rock is put in our way to keep us from running out to the safety of the open sea—the authority of the apostle Paul writing to Timothy is brought forward, where, discussing widows, he says: “I would have the younger women marry, bear children, be mistresses of households, and give the adversary no occasion for reproach; for some have already turned aside after Satan”—we must first examine the sense of the precept and discuss the whole context of this passage, and so, treading in the apostle’s footsteps, not turn aside even a nail’s breadth, as the saying goes, to the other side. Above he had written what kind of widow she ought to be: the wife of one husband, who has brought up children, who has a good report for good works, who has ministered from her small means to those in distress, whose hope is God, and who continues in supplications and prayers night and day. After this he adds the contrary: “But she who lives in pleasure is dead while she lives.” And at once he goes on and fortifies his disciple with every art of teaching: “But avoid the younger widows; for when they have grown wanton in Christ, they wish to marry, having condemnation, because they have made void their first faith.” On account of these, then, who have committed sexual immorality to the injury of their husband Christ—for that is what the Greek word katastrēniasousin means—the apostle wills another marriage, preferring a second marriage to sexual immorality, only by way of indulgence, not by way of command.

At the same time each word of the testimony must be examined. “I would have,” he says, “the young women marry.” Why, I ask? Because I would not have young women commit sexual immorality. “Bear children.” For what reason? So that they may not be driven, for fear of childbirth, to kill children conceived in adultery. “Be mistresses of households.” Why, I beg? Because it is far more tolerable to be twice married than a harlot, to have a second husband than many adulterers. In the one there is a consolation for misfortune; in the other, the penalty of sin. There follows: “Give the adversary no occasion for reproach.” In this brief and compact precept many warnings are contained at once: that more elaborate dress should not bring the widow’s profession into ill repute; that she should not by nods of the eyes and cheerfulness of face draw flocks of young men after her; that she should not promise one thing by her words and another by her bearing, so that the well-known line fits her: “She laughed, and with her roguish eye promised something.” And to sum up in a short phrase all the reasons for marrying, he shows why he had given this command, saying: “For some have already turned aside after Satan.” That is why he opens a second and, if need be, a third marriage to the incontinent: to draw them away from Satan, to make a woman joined to a husband of whatever kind rather than to the devil. He says something similar to the Corinthians too: “I say to the unmarried and to widows: it is good for them if they remain as I am. But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry; for it is better to marry.” Why, apostle? You immediately add: because it is worse to burn.