Letters 130.14–131.8

I think it superfluous to warn you against avarice, since it is the way of your family both to possess riches and to trample on them, and the apostle teaches that avarice is idolatry, and the Lord answers the one who asked, 'Good Master, what good shall I do to possess eternal life?': 'If you wish to be perfect, go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.' It belongs to the height of the apostles and to perfect virtue to sell everything and distribute to the poor, and so, light and unencumbered, to fly up with Christ to heavenly things. To us, or rather to you, a careful stewardship has been entrusted, although in this every age and every person has been left freedom of choice. 'If you wish,' he says, 'to be perfect.' I do not compel, I do not command, but I set out the palm, I show the rewards; it is yours to choose whether you wish to be crowned in the contest and the struggle. And let us consider how wisely Wisdom has spoken: 'Sell what you have.' To whom is this commanded? Surely to him to whom it was said, 'If you wish to be perfect.' Sell not part of your goods, but all. And when you have sold, what follows? 'And give to the poor.' Not to the rich, not to relatives, not for luxury but for need. Whether he is a priest or a kinsman or a relation by marriage, consider nothing in him but his poverty. Let the stomachs of the hungry praise you, not the rich banquets of those who belch. In the Acts of the Apostles, when the blood of our Lord was still warm and faith was fresh and fervent in believers, all sold their possessions and brought their price to the apostles' feet, to show that money must be trampled on; and it was given to each as he had need. Ananias and Sapphira, fearful stewards, or rather double-hearted and therefore condemned, because after their vow they offered as if it were their own and not his to whom they had once vowed it, and kept back for themselves part of property that was already another's, fearing a famine which true faith does not fear, deserved an immediate punishment, not through the cruelty of the sentence but as an example for correction. In fact the apostle Peter by no means called down death on them, as a foolish philosopher slanders him, but announced God's judgment by the prophetic spirit, so that the punishment of two people might be the instruction of many. From the time you were consecrated to perpetual virginity, your things are not yours; or rather they are truly yours, because they have begun to be Christ's; and while your grandmother or your mother lives, they are to be managed at their discretion. But if they die and rest in the sleep of the saints (for I know that they too wish to leave you behind them), when your age is more mature, your will more serious, and your judgment firmer, you will do what seems good to you, or rather what the Lord commands, knowing that you will have nothing except what you have spent on good works. Let others build churches, cover the walls with marble veneer, bring in massive columns and gild their capitals, which do not feel their costly ornament, and set off the doors with ivory and silver and the golden or gilded altars with gems; I do not blame it, I do not refuse it; let each abound in his own sense; and it is better to do this than to brood over hoarded wealth. But you have another purpose: to clothe Christ in the poor, to visit him in the sick, to feed him in the hungry, to receive him in those who lack a roof, and especially in the household of faith; to support monasteries of virgins, to take care of the servants of God and the poor in spirit, who serve your Lord day and night, who, placed on earth, imitate the way of life of the angels and speak of nothing but what belongs to the praises of God, and, having food and clothing, rejoice in these riches and want no more, provided they keep their purpose. Otherwise, if they desire more, they are proved unworthy even of what is necessary. Let this be what I say to a rich virgin and a noble virgin.

Now I will speak only to the virgin, that is, considering only the things that are in you, not those outside you. Besides the order of psalms and prayer, which you must always keep at the third, sixth, and ninth hours, at evening, at midnight, and in the morning, decide how many hours you should spend learning holy Scripture by heart, and how long you should read, not as a labour but for the delight and instruction of the soul. When you have finished these periods, and anxiety of mind has often roused you to bend your knees, always have wool in your hands: either draw down the threads from the distaff with your thumb, or let the spindles turn in their baskets to twist the woof; or gather into a ball what others have spun, or arrange it for weaving. Look over what has been woven; correct what is faulty; settle what is to be done. If you are occupied with so many varieties of work, the days will never be long for you; however much they are stretched by the summer sun, they will seem short, in which some piece of work has been left undone. By keeping to this you will save both yourself and others; you will be a teacher of holy living and will make the chastity of many your gain, since Scripture says, 'Every idle soul is in desires.' And you must not stop working because, by God's favour, you lack nothing; rather you must labour with everyone so that, through the occasion of work, you think of nothing but what belongs to the service of the Lord. I will speak plainly: though you distribute your whole fortune to the poor, nothing will be more precious in Christ's sight than what you have made with your own hands, whether for your own use, or as an example to other virgins, or to offer to your grandmother and mother, to receive from them a higher price for the relief of the poor.

I almost passed over what is perhaps most important. While you were a little girl, and Anastasius, a bishop of holy and blessed memory, was ruling the Roman church, a fierce storm of heretics from the regions of the East tried to pollute and undermine the simplicity of faith that was praised by the apostle's voice. But that man of richest poverty and apostolic care at once struck the noxious head and silenced the hissing mouths of the hydra. And because I fear, indeed I have learned by report, that the poisonous seedlings still live and sprout in some, I think I should forewarn you with the loving affection of charity to hold the faith of holy Innocent, who is the successor and son of the aforesaid man and of the apostolic see, and not to receive a foreign doctrine, however prudent and clever it may seem to you. For people of this kind are accustomed to mutter in corners and, as if seeking the justice of God, to ask: 'Why was that soul born in that province? What was the cause that some are born of Christian parents, others among wild and most savage nations where there is no knowledge of God?' And when with this, as with the sting of a scorpion, they have struck the simple and made a place for themselves by a festering wound, they pour out their poison: 'Do you think that it is for nothing that a little infant, who can hardly recognize his mother by a smile and a cheerful face, who has done nothing good or evil, is seized by a demon, overwhelmed by jaundice, and suffers what we see wicked men do not suffer, and servants of God do suffer? But if', they say, 'the judgments of the Lord are true, justified in themselves, and there is nothing unjust with God, we are compelled by reason itself to believe that souls existed in the heavens and, condemned for certain ancient sins, have been, so to speak, buried in human bodies, and that we are paying the penalty for our sins in this valley of tears. That is why the prophet says, "Before I was humbled, I sinned"; and, "Bring my soul out of prison"; and, "Did this man sin, or his parents, that he was born blind?"' and other things like these. This impious and wicked doctrine was formerly current in Egypt and the regions of the East, and is now current secretly, as if in vipers' holes, among many; it pollutes the purity of those regions and, like a hereditary disease, creeps among a few so as to reach very many. I am sure that if you hear it you will not accept it. For you have women to teach you in God's sight whose faith is the rule of doctrine. You understand what I mean (for God will give you understanding in all things), and you will not at once demand a reply against this most savage heresy and things much worse than those I have mentioned, lest I seem not so much to have forbidden as to have given notice of it, since the purpose of the present work is to instruct a virgin, not to answer heretics. As for all their deceits and the tunnels by which they try to overthrow the truth, I have overthrown them with God's help in another work, which, if you wish, I will send you readily and gladly. For they say that goods offered unasked smell bad, and that prices fall with easy supply, which are always higher when things are rare.

There is often a debate among many whether the solitary life or life in community is better. The former is indeed preferred to the latter; but if it is dangerous for men, lest, withdrawn from the company of people, they lie open to base and impious thoughts and, full of arrogance and disdain, despise everyone and arm their tongues to disparage either clerics or other monks (of whom it is most rightly said, 'The sons of men, their teeth are weapons and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword'), how much more for women, whose changeable and wavering judgment, if left to itself, soon slips down to worse things! I have known persons of both sexes whose soundness of brain was disturbed by excessive abstinence, especially among those who lived in damp and cold cells, so that they did not know what they were doing or which way to turn, what they ought to say or do. Certainly, if people untrained in secular letters read something from the treatises of eloquent men, they learn only wordiness without knowledge of the Scriptures, and, as the old saying goes, though they do not know how to speak they cannot keep silent; they teach the Scriptures that they do not understand, and when they have persuaded others, they assume the airs of the learned, masters of the ignorant before they are disciples of the learned. It is good, then, to obey one's elders, to submit to the perfect, and after the rules of the Scriptures to learn the path of one's life from others, and not to use the worst of teachers, namely one's own presumption. Of such women the apostle too speaks, who are carried about by every wind of doctrine, always learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth.

Avoid the company of matrons who serve husbands and the world, lest your mind be unsettled and you hear what a husband said to his wife or a wife to her husband. Such conversations are poisonous; in condemning them the apostle took a secular verse and made it one of the church's: 'Evil conversations corrupt good manners'; the Latin translation, keeping word for word, has by no means reproduced the metre of this iambic line. Choose as your companions grave women, especially widows and virgins, whose way of life is proven, whose speech is moderate, whose modesty is holy. Flee the wantonness of girls who adorn their heads, let their hair fall over the forehead, polish their skin, use cosmetics, wear tight sleeves, garments without a wrinkle, and dainty slippers, so that under the name of virgin they may perish at a higher price. For the character and pursuits of mistresses are generally judged from the character of their maids and companions. Let her be beautiful to you, let her be lovable, let her be held among your companions, who does not know she is beautiful, who neglects the gift of beauty, and who, going out in public, does not bare her breast and neck nor show her throat by throwing back her cloak, but hides her face and walks with only one eye uncovered, the one necessary for the road.

I hesitate whether to speak; but, willing or unwilling, since it happens often, it must be said; not that I ought to fear these things in you, who perhaps do not know of them and have never heard of them, but that others may be forewarned through the occasion of you. Boys with little curls and crimped hair, whose skins smell of foreign musk (of whom there is that line of Arbiter's, 'He does not smell good who always smells good'), let a virgin shun them as plagues and poisons of chastity; to say nothing of others, whose importunate visits bring disgrace both on themselves and on other women, so that even if no evil deed is committed, this is itself a very great evil, to lie open for nothing to the insults and bites of the heathen. Nor do I say this of all, but of those whom the church itself reproves, whom it sometimes casts out, and on whom the censure of bishops and presbyters has sometimes fallen heavily, so that it is almost more dangerous for wanton girls to go to places of worship than into public. Let those who live in a monastery, where there is a great number together, never go out alone, never without their mother. From a flock of doves the hawk often separates one, which it at once attacks and tears and gorges on its flesh and blood. Sick sheep leave their flock and are devoured in the jaws of wolves. I know holy virgins who on feast days keep their foot at home because of the crowds, and do not go out at the very time when greater watchfulness is needed and the public must be avoided altogether. About thirty years ago I published a book on keeping virginity, in which I had to go against the vices and, for the instruction of the virgin I was advising, to expose the snares of the devil. That discourse offended very many, since each, recognizing in himself what was said, did not listen gladly as to an adviser, but turned away as from an accuser of his conduct. Yet what did it profit them to have armed an army of protesters and to have shown by their pain the wound of their conscience? The book remains; the men have passed away. I have also written little studies to many virgins and widows, and whatever could be said has been culled in those small works; so that either I would repeat the same things superfluously, or what is now passed over would do great harm. Certainly blessed Cyprian too published an excellent volume on virginity, and many others, in Latin as well as Greek, and in the letters and languages of all nations, especially in the churches, have praised the chaste life. But let this concern those who have not yet chosen virginity and need encouragement to know the nature of what they ought to choose; we must keep what we have chosen, and walk as if among scorpions and snakes, so that, with girded loins, shod feet, and staffs in hand, we may make our journey through the snares of this world and among its poisons, and may be able to reach the sweet waters of the Jordan, enter the land of promise, go up to the house of God, and say with the prophet, 'Lord, I have loved the beauty of your house and the place where your glory dwells,' and, 'One thing I have asked of the Lord; this I will seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.' Happy that conscience and blessed that virginity in whose heart no other love dwells except the love of Christ, who is wisdom, chastity, patience, and justice and the other virtues; which never sighs at the memory of a man, nor desires to see one whom, once seen, she would not want to let go. The name of some women who do not behave well brings disgrace on the holy profession of virgins and the glory of the heavenly and angelic household. To them it must be said plainly: either marry, if they cannot contain themselves, or contain themselves, if they do not wish to marry. It is a thing for laughter, or rather for tears: when the mistresses walk out, the virgin maid goes before them more finely dressed, so that, because of the excessive custom, you would suspect the one you see unadorned to be the mistress. Some seek separate lodgings without witnesses, so as to live more freely, use the baths, do what they like, and avoid the knowledge of the many. These things we see and tolerate, and if a gold coin shines, we count them among good works.

I join the end to the beginning, and I am not content to have warned you once. Love the holy Scriptures, and wisdom will love you. Cherish her, and she will keep you; honour her, and she will embrace you. Let these jewels cling to your breast and your ears. Let your tongue know nothing but Christ; let it be able to utter nothing but what is holy. Let the sweetness of your grandmother and your mother always be on your lips; to imitate them is the pattern of virtue.

Our God, who has called us into his kingdom and glory, I have asked and I ask that he may be pleased to make this fruitful for us, which I write to you, holy brother Jerome, consulting you about things I do not know. For although I consult you as one much older than I am, I am myself already an old man. But no age can seem to me too late for learning what is needed; for although it is more fitting for old men to teach than to learn, it is still more fitting for them to learn than to be ignorant of what they teach. Nothing in all my difficulties, which I suffer in the hardest questions, troubles me more than the absence of your charity at so great a distance, so that I can hardly send my letters or receive yours, at intervals not of days, not of months, but of several years; whereas, if it were possible, I would wish to have you present every day, to talk with about whatever I wished. Yet I ought not for that reason to leave undone what I could do, even if I could not do all that I wished.

See, there has come to me a devout young man, a brother in the catholic peace, in age a son, in rank our fellow presbyter, Orosius: alert in mind, ready in speech, burning with zeal, desiring to be a useful vessel in the house of the Lord for refuting the false and pernicious doctrines that have slaughtered the souls of the Spaniards far more unhappily than the barbarian sword has their bodies. For he hurried from there, from the shore of the ocean, all the way to us, stirred by the report that he could hear from me whatever he wished about the things he wanted to know. And his coming has not been without fruit: first, that he should not believe much of the report about me; then I taught the man what I could, and for what I could not, I advised him where he could learn it, and urged him to go to you. When he received my counsel or instruction willingly and obediently, I asked him to return home by way of us when he comes from you. Holding him to this promise, I believed that the Lord had given me an opportunity to write to you about the things I wish to learn through you. For I was looking for someone to send to you, and no one suitable readily presented himself, with faithfulness in acting, readiness in obeying, and experience in travelling. So when I had tested this young man, I could not doubt that he was just such a one as I was asking of the Lord.

Receive, then, the things I ask you not to be reluctant to open and discuss for me. The question of the soul troubles many, among whom I confess that I too am one. For I will not keep silent about what I hold most firmly concerning the soul; then I will add what I still wish to have explained to me. The soul of man is immortal in a certain mode of its own. For it is not immortal in every way, as God is, of whom it is said that he alone has immortality (for holy Scripture mentions many deaths of the soul; hence that saying, 'Let the dead bury their dead'); but because it dies, when alienated from the life of God, in such a way that it does not altogether cease to live in its own nature, it is found to be mortal for some reason, in such a way that it may also be called immortal not without reason. The soul is not a part of God. For if it were, it would be in every way unchangeable and incorruptible. And if it were so, it would neither fall away to worse nor advance to better, nor begin to have in itself something it did not have, nor cease to have what it had, as far as its own affections are concerned. How differently it is in fact, there is no need of outside testimony; whoever pays attention to himself recognizes it. Those who hold that the soul is a part of God say in vain that its stain and baseness, which we see in the most wicked men, and indeed this weakness and sickness, which we feel in all men, does not come to it from itself but from the body. What does it matter from where it becomes sick, if, were it unchangeable, it could not become sick from anywhere at all? For what is truly unchangeable and incorruptible cannot be changed or corrupted by the approach of anything. Otherwise not only Achilles's flesh, as the fables tell, but all flesh would be invulnerable, if no accident befell it. So that nature is not unchangeable which is changeable in some way, for some cause, in some part; but it is impious to believe God to be anything but truly and supremely unchangeable. Therefore the soul is not a part of God.

That the soul is also incorporeal, although it is hard to persuade slower minds of this, I confess that I am persuaded. But so as neither to start a dispute about a word needlessly nor to suffer one deservedly (since, when the thing is agreed, there is no need to fight over the name): if every substance or essence, or whatever is more aptly called that which in some way exists in itself, is a body, then the soul is a body. Likewise, if one chooses to call incorporeal only that nature which is supremely unchangeable and wholly present everywhere, the soul is a body, since it is not anything of that kind. Further, if nothing is a body except what is set or moved through extension of place with some length, breadth, and height, so that it occupies a greater place with a greater part of itself and a smaller place with a smaller, and is less in the part than in the whole, then the soul is not a body. For it extends through the whole body that it animates, not by local diffusion, but by a certain vital tension; for it is present, whole, at once, through all its small parts, not smaller in the smaller and greater in the greater, but more intensely in one place, more slackly in another, and whole in all and whole in each. For in no other way does it feel as a whole what it feels in a part of the body and not in the whole. When something touches a tiny point in living flesh, though that place is not only not the whole body but is hardly visible in the body, it does not escape the whole soul; and what is felt does not run through all the parts of the body, but is felt only where it occurs. How then does what does not happen in the whole reach the whole soul at once, unless the soul is whole also there where it happens, and does not desert the rest in order to be whole there? For those other parts, where nothing of the kind has happened, go on living by its presence. And if something did happen there too, and both happened at once, both at once would equally not escape the whole soul. Accordingly, it could not be whole at once in all and in each of the small parts of its body if it were diffused through them in the way we see bodies diffused through spaces, occupying less with their smaller parts and more with their larger. Therefore, if the soul is to be called a body, it is certainly not a body such as earth is, nor such as water or air or ether. For all such things are greater in greater places and smaller in smaller, and none of them is present whole in any part of itself; but as the parts of places are, so they are occupied by the parts of bodies. From this it is understood that the soul, whether it is to be called body or incorporeal, has a certain nature of its own, created as a substance more excellent than all these elements of the worldly mass, which cannot truly be thought of in any imagination of bodily images, such as we perceive through the senses of the flesh, but is understood by the mind and felt by life. I do not say these things in order to teach you what you know, but to make clear what I hold most firmly about the soul, so that no one may think, when I come to what I am asking, that I hold nothing about the soul by knowledge or by faith.

I am also certain that the soul fell into sin through no fault of God, no necessity from God or from itself, but by its own will; and that it cannot be freed from the body of this death either by the power of its own will, as though that were sufficient for it, or by the death of the body itself, but by the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord; and that there is no soul at all in the human race which does not need for its deliverance the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. Whatever soul leaves the body at any age of the body without the grace of the Mediator and his sacrament will be in punishment and at the last judgment will receive its body back for punishment. But if, after the human generation that came from Adam, it is regenerated in Christ, belonging to his fellowship, it will have rest after the death of the body and will receive its body back for glory. These are the things I hold most firmly about the soul.

Now hear, I beg you, what I am asking, and do not despise me; so may he not despise you who deigned to be despised for us. I ask where the soul has contracted the guilt by which it is dragged into condemnation, even that of an infant overtaken by death, if the grace of Christ has not come to its aid through the sacrament by which even little children are baptized. For you are not one of those who have just begun to chatter certain novelties, saying that there is no guilt derived from Adam to be loosed in an infant through baptism. If I knew that you held that view, or rather if I did not know that you do not hold it, I would by no means ask this of you or think it should be asked. But since we hold your opinion on this matter, which accords with the well-founded catholic faith, by which, refuting the empty talk of Jovinian, you cited the testimony from the book of Job, 'No one is clean in your sight, not even an infant whose life upon earth is of one day,' and then added, 'held guilty in the likeness of Adam's transgression'; and your book on the prophet Jonah declares this clearly and strikingly enough, where you said that the little children were rightly compelled to fast because of original sin itself: I do not ask you inappropriately where the soul contracted this guilt, from which it must be freed even at that age through the sacrament of Christian grace.

Some years ago, when I was writing certain books on free will, which have gone out into many hands and are possessed by very many, I thought that four opinions about the soul's incarnation (whether the rest are propagated from that one which was given to the first man; or new souls are made even now for each individual; or souls already existing somewhere are either sent by God into bodies or fall into them of their own accord) should be treated in such a way that, whichever of them was true, it would not hinder my purpose; for I was then contending with all the strength I could against those who try to bring in a nature of evil endowed with its own principle against God, that is, against the Manichees. For I had as yet heard nothing of the Priscillianists, who utter blasphemies not very different from theirs. For this reason I did not add the fifth opinion, which you mentioned among the others in your letter, so as not to pass any over, when you replied to the man of devout memory, most dear to us in the love of Christ, Marcellinus, who asked you about this question: namely, that the soul is a part of God. First, because when this is asked, the question is not about its incarnation but about its nature; then, because this is what those I was opposing hold, and my chief aim was to separate the blameless and inviolable nature of the Creator from the vices and stain of the creature, since they contend that the very substance of the good God, in the part in which it was captured, was corrupted and oppressed by the substance of evil, to which they attribute its own principle and princes, and was brought to the necessity of sinning. So, setting aside this error of heretical opinion, I wish to know which of the four remaining opinions should be chosen. For whichever is to be chosen, far be it from it to attack this faith, of which we are certain: that every soul, even that of a little infant, needs deliverance from the bond of sin, and that there is none except through Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

So, not to be long: you certainly hold that God even now makes individual souls for individuals as they are born. Lest the objection be raised against this view that God completed all creatures on the sixth day and rested on the seventh, you cite the testimony from the Gospel, 'My Father works until now.' So you wrote to Marcellinus, in which letter you were also kind enough to mention me most generously, saying that he had me here in Africa, who could more easily explain that opinion to him. If I could have done so, he would not have asked this of you, placed so far away; if indeed he wrote to you from Africa. For when he wrote, I do not know; I know only that he well knew my hesitation about this, and for that reason he chose to act without consulting me. And yet, even if he had consulted me, I would rather have encouraged him and thanked him, since it could have been of benefit to us all, if you had not preferred to write back briefly rather than to answer, I suppose so as not to labour needlessly where I was, whom you thought to know best what he had asked. See, I wish that opinion to be mine too; but I do not yet affirm that it is.