Letters 53.1–53.11

Brother Ambrose, bringing your little gifts, delivered also a most delightful letter, which, at the very beginning of our friendship, showed the loyalty of a friendship already proven and old. For that is a true bond, joined by the glue of Christ, which is brought about not by advantage in household affairs, not merely by bodily presence, not by crafty and fawning flattery, but by the fear of the Lord and the study of the divine Scriptures. We read in the old histories that some travelled through provinces, visited new peoples, and crossed seas in order to see face to face those they had known from books. So Pythagoras visited the seers of Memphis; so Plato visited Egypt and, for the sake of Archytas of Tarentum, that coast of Italy too which was once called Great Greece, travelling with great toil; so that he who was master at Athens, and powerful, whose teaching resounded through the gymnasia of the Academy, became a stranger and a pupil, preferring to learn modestly from others rather than to push his own ideas shamelessly on them. Indeed, while he pursued learning as it fled, so to speak, over the whole world, he was captured by pirates and sold, and even obeyed a most cruel tyrant: a captive, bound, and a slave, yet, because a philosopher, greater than the man who bought him. We read that a man of Gades came from the furthest ends of the earth to see Titus Livy, flowing with a milky fountain of eloquence; and one whom Rome had not drawn to see it was brought by the fame of a single man. That age had a marvel unheard of, to be celebrated by all ages: that one who had entered the capital of the whole world should seek something else outside it. Apollonius (whether a magician, as the common people say, or a philosopher, as the Pythagoreans report) entered Persia, crossed the Caucasus and the lands of the Albanians, Scythians, and Massagetae, penetrated the richest kingdoms of India, and at last, crossing the very broad river Phison, came to the Brahmans, to hear Hiarcas, sitting on a golden throne and drinking from the fountain of Tantalus, teaching a few disciples about nature, morals, and the course of the stars. Thence he returned through the Elamites, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Medes, Assyrians, Parthians, Syrians, Phoenicians, and Arabs to Palestine, went on to Alexandria, and visited Ethiopia to see the gymnosophists and the famous Table of the Sun in the sand. That man found everywhere something to learn, so that, always advancing, he always became better.

Why speak of men of the world, when the apostle Paul, the chosen vessel and teacher of the Gentiles, who speaks with awareness of the great guest within him, 'Do you seek proof of him who speaks in me, Christ?', after Damascus and a journey through Arabia went up to Jerusalem to see Peter and stayed with him fifteen days (for by this teaching of the seven and the eight the future preacher of the Gentiles was to be instructed), and again, after fourteen years, taking Barnabas and Titus, laid the Gospel before the apostles, lest perhaps he should be running or had run in vain? The living voice has some hidden energy, and, poured from the author's mouth into the disciple's ears, it sounds more strongly. So too Aeschines, when he was an exile at Rhodes and that speech of Demosthenes which he had delivered against him was being read, while all admired and praised it, sighed and said: 'What if you had heard the beast himself thundering out his own words?'

I do not say this because there is anything in me of the kind that you could or would wish to learn, but because your ardor and zeal for learning ought to be approved for their own sake, without us; a teachable mind is praiseworthy even without a teacher. We consider not what you find but what you seek. Soft wax, easy to shape, even if the hand of the craftsman and modeller is idle, is still potentially all that it can be. The apostle Paul glories in having learned the law and the prophets at the feet of Gamaliel, so that, armed with spiritual weapons, he could afterwards say confidently: 'For the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly, but powerful before God for the destruction of strongholds, destroying reasonings and every height that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and taking captive every thought to obey Christ, and ready to punish all disobedience.' He instructs Timothy, trained from infancy in the sacred writings, and urges him to study reading, and not to neglect the grace that was given him through the laying on of hands of the presbytery. He instructs Titus that, among the other virtues of a bishop, whom he portrays in a brief sentence, he should also look for knowledge of the Scriptures: 'holding fast the faithful word which is according to the teaching, so that he may be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.' For a holy rusticity benefits only itself, and as much as it builds up the church of Christ by the merit of its life, so much it harms it if it does not resist those who contradict. The prophet Malachi, or rather the Lord through Malachi, says: 'Ask the priests the law'; so much is it the priest's duty to answer about the law when asked. And in Deuteronomy we read: 'Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders and they will tell you.' In the hundred and eighteenth psalm too: 'Your statutes were my songs in the place of my pilgrimage.' And in the description of the righteous man, when David compares him to the tree of life in paradise, among the other virtues he adds this too: 'His delight was in the law of the Lord, and on his law he will meditate day and night.' Daniel at the end of his most sacred vision says that the righteous will shine like stars, and the understanding, that is, the learned, like the firmament. Do you see how far apart righteous rusticity and learned righteousness are? The one is compared to the stars, the other to the heavens; although according to the Hebrew truth both can be taken of the learned, for so we read in their text: 'Those who are learned will shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who instruct many in righteousness like the stars for ever and ever.' Why is the apostle Paul a chosen vessel? Surely because he is a vessel of the law and a bookcase of the holy Scriptures. The Pharisees are astonished at the Lord's teaching; they wonder at Peter and John, how they know the law when they have not learned letters. For what practice and daily meditation on the law usually give to others, the Holy Spirit supplied to them; and they were, as it is written, 'taught by God.' The Savior had completed twelve years, and in the temple, questioning the elders on points of the law, he rather teaches them by his prudent questions.

Unless perhaps we call Peter a rustic, and John a rustic too, each of whom could say, 'Even if I am unskilled in speech, yet not in knowledge.' Was John a rustic, a fisherman, unlearned? Then where, I ask, does this come from: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God'? In Greek λόγος means many things: it is word, and reason, and reckoning, and the cause of each thing, through which the individual things that exist have their being; and we rightly understand all of these here. This Plato did not know; this the eloquent Demosthenes was ignorant of. 'I will destroy,' he says, 'the wisdom of the wise and reject the understanding of the prudent.' True wisdom destroys false wisdom; and although the foolishness of preaching is in the cross, yet Paul speaks wisdom among the perfect, 'a wisdom not of this age nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away, but he speaks the wisdom of God hidden in a mystery, which God predestined before the ages.' The wisdom of God is Christ, for Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. This wisdom is hidden in a mystery; of it the title of the ninth psalm is written, 'For the hidden things of the Son'; in him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; and he who was hidden in a mystery was predestined before the ages, predestined and prefigured in the law and the prophets. Hence the prophets were called seers, because they saw him whom others did not see. Abraham saw his day and was glad. The heavens were opened to Ezekiel, which were shut to the sinful people. 'Open my eyes,' says David, 'and I will behold wonderful things out of your law.' For the law is spiritual and needs revelation to be understood, so that with unveiled face we may behold the glory of God.

In the Apocalypse a book is shown sealed with seven seals; if you give it to a man who knows letters to read, he will answer you: 'I cannot, for it is sealed.' How many today, who think they know letters, hold a sealed book and cannot open it unless he unlocks it who has the key of David, who opens and no one shuts, who shuts and no one opens! In the Acts of the Apostles the holy eunuch, or rather man (for so Scripture calls him), when he was reading Isaiah and was asked by Philip, 'Do you think you understand what you are reading?', answered, 'How can I, unless someone teaches me?' I, to speak of myself for a moment, am neither holier nor more studious than this eunuch, who came from Ethiopia, that is, from the furthest ends of the world, to the temple, and left the royal court; and so great was his love of divine knowledge that he read the sacred writings even in his carriage. And yet, though he held the book, conceived the Lord's words in his thought, turned them on his tongue, and sounded them with his lips, he did not know him whom he was worshipping in the book without knowing it. Philip came and showed him Jesus, who was hidden, shut up in the letter; and (O the wonderful power of the teacher!) in the same hour he believes, is baptized, becomes faithful and holy, and a teacher instead of a disciple; he found more in the desert fountain of the church than in the gilded temple of the synagogue.

I have touched on these things briefly, since the narrow bounds of a letter did not allow me to range further, so that you may understand that you cannot enter the holy Scriptures without someone going before you and showing you the path. I say nothing of grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, geometers, dialecticians, musicians, astronomers, and physicians, whose knowledge is most useful to mortals and is divided into three parts: doctrine, method, and experience. I will come to the lesser arts, which are carried out not so much by reason as by hand. Farmers, masons, smiths, cutters of metal and wood, wool-workers too and fullers, and the others who make various furniture and cheap articles, cannot become what they wish without a teacher. 'Physicians undertake what belongs to physicians; smiths handle smiths' tools.'

The art of the Scriptures is the only one that everyone everywhere claims for himself: 'Learned and unlearned, we all write poems everywhere.' This the chattering old woman, the doting old man, the wordy sophist, this everyone presumes to know, tears to pieces, teaches before they learn. Some, with knitted brows, weighing grand words, philosophize about the sacred writings among women; others learn (for shame!) from women what they are to teach men; and, as if that were too little, with a certain fluency, or rather audacity, they expound to others what they do not themselves understand. I say nothing of those like myself who, if they have come to the holy Scriptures after secular literature and have charmed the ear of the people with polished speech, think whatever they say is the law of God, and do not deign to learn what the prophets and apostles meant, but fit unsuitable testimonies to their own meaning; as if it were a great thing, and not the most faulty kind of speaking, to distort meanings and drag a reluctant Scripture to one's own will. As if we had not read the Homer-centos and Virgil-centos, and could not in the same way call Maro a Christian without Christ, because he wrote: 'Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new offspring is sent down from high heaven'; and the Father speaking to the Son: 'Son, my strength, my great might, you alone'; and, after the Savior's words on the cross: 'Such things he said, and stood firm, and remained fixed.' These things are childish and like the game of mountebanks: to teach what you do not know, or rather, to speak with Clitomachus, not even to know that you do not know.

Of course Genesis is perfectly plain, in which is written the creation of the world, the beginning of the human race, the division of the earth, the confusion of tongues, and the nation of the Hebrews going down into Egypt. Exodus is open, with its ten plagues, its Decalogue, its mystical and divine precepts. The book of Leviticus is ready to hand, in which each sacrifice, indeed almost every syllable, and the vestments of Aaron and the whole Levitical order breathe heavenly mysteries. Does not Numbers contain the mysteries of all arithmetic, of the prophecy of Balaam, and of the forty-two stations in the wilderness? Deuteronomy too, the second law and a foreshadowing of the law of the Gospel, does it not contain what came before in such a way that yet all is new out of the old? Thus far Moses, thus far the Pentateuch, the five words in which the apostle boasts that he wishes to speak in church. Job, the model of patience, what mysteries does his discourse not embrace? It begins in prose, glides into verse, and ends in plain speech; and it sets out the premises of all dialectic, determining them by proposition, assumption, proof, and conclusion. Every word in it is full of meaning, and, to say nothing of the rest, it so prophesies the resurrection of bodies that no one has written of it more plainly or more cautiously: 'I know,' he says, 'that my Redeemer lives, and that on the last day I shall rise from the earth. And again I shall be clothed with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see God, whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. This hope of mine is laid up in my bosom.' I come to Jesus son of Nun, a type of the Lord not only in his deeds but also in his name: he crosses the Jordan, overthrows the kingdoms of the enemy, divides the land to the victorious people, and, through each city, village, mountain, river, torrent, and boundary, describes the spiritual kingdoms of the church and of the heavenly Jerusalem. In the book of Judges there are as many figures as there are leaders of the people. Ruth the Moabitess fulfils the prophecy of Isaiah, who says: 'Send forth the lamb, O Lord, the ruler of the earth, from the rock of the desert to the mount of the daughter of Zion.' Samuel, in the death of Eli and the slaying of Saul, testifies that the old law has been abolished, and in Zadok and David the mysteries of a new priesthood and a new kingdom. Malachim, that is, the third and fourth book of Kings, describes the kingdom of Judah from Solomon to Jechoniah, and the kingdom of Israel from Jeroboam son of Nebat to Hoshea, who was led away to the Assyrians. If you look at the history, the words are simple; if at the sense hidden in the letter, the smallness of the church and the wars of heretics against the church are narrated. The twelve prophets, pressed into the narrow space of one volume, prefigure something very different from what they sound in the letter. Hosea often names Ephraim, Samaria, Joseph, Jezreel, and a wife of harlotry and children of harlotry, and an adulteress shut up in her husband's chamber, sitting a long time as a widow and, in mourning garments, awaiting her husband's return to her. Joel son of Pethuel describes the land of the twelve tribes consumed by the caterpillar, the cankerworm, the locust, and the blight, and that after the overthrow of the former people the Holy Spirit would be poured out on the servants and handmaids of God, that is, on the hundred and twenty names of believers, and poured out in the upper room of Zion; and these hundred and twenty, rising little by little and by increments from one to fifteen, make the number of the fifteen steps which are mystically contained in the Psalter. Amos, the shepherd and rustic, stripping mulberries from brambles, cannot be explained in a few words. For who could worthily express the three and four transgressions of Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, the sons of Ammon and Moab, and in the seventh and eighth degree of Judah and Israel? He speaks to the fat cows that are on the mountain of Samaria, and testifies that the greater and the lesser house will fall. He sees the maker of the locust, and the Lord standing on a wall plastered or of adamant, and a hook of fruit drawing punishments on sinners, and a famine on the land: 'not a famine of bread nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord.' Obadiah, whose name means 'servant of the Lord,' thunders against Edom, the bloody and earthly one, ever the rival of his brother Jacob, and strikes him with a spiritual spear. Jonah, a most beautiful dove, prefiguring the Lord's passion by his shipwreck, calls the world back to repentance and, under the name of Nineveh, announces salvation to the Gentiles. Micah of Moresheth, a fellow heir of Christ, announces the devastation of the daughter of the robber and lays siege against her, because she struck the cheek of the judge of Israel. Nahum, the comforter of the world, rebukes the city of blood and after its overthrow says: 'Behold on the mountains the feet of him who brings good news and announces peace.' Habakkuk, a strong and unbending wrestler, stands on his watch and sets his foot on the tower, to contemplate Christ on the cross and say: 'His power covered the heavens, and the earth is full of his praise, and his brightness will be like the light; horns are in his hands; there his strength is hidden.' Zephaniah, the watchman and knower of the Lord's secrets, hears a cry from the Fish Gate, a wailing from the Second Quarter, and a crashing from the hills. He proclaims howling to the inhabitants of the Mortar, because all the people of Canaan are silenced, and all who were wrapped in silver have perished. Haggai, festive and joyful, who sowed in tears to reap in joy, builds the ruined temple and brings in God the Father saying: 'Yet once more, a little while, and I will shake heaven and earth, sea and dry land, and I will move all nations, and the one desired by all nations will come.' Zechariah, 'mindful of his Lord,' manifold in prophecy, sees Jesus clothed in filthy garments, and a stone with seven eyes, and a golden lampstand with as many lamps as eyes, and two olive trees on the left and right of the lamp, so that after the red, dappled, white, and black horses, and the chariots scattered from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem, he may foretell and proclaim a poor king sitting on a colt, the foal of a donkey under the yoke. Malachi, openly and at the end of all the prophets, speaks of the rejection of Israel and the calling of the Gentiles: 'I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord of hosts, and I will not accept an offering from your hand. For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place sacrifice is offered, and a pure offering, to my name.' Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel: who could either understand or explain them? The first seems to me to weave not a prophecy but a gospel. The second weaves together the rod of almond and the boiling pot from the face of the north, and the leopard stripped of its colors, and a fourfold alphabet in different meters. The third has its beginning and end wrapped in such obscurities that among the Hebrews these parts, together with the beginning of Genesis, are not read before the age of thirty. The fourth, the last among the four prophets, knowing the times and a lover of the history of the whole world, proclaims in clear words the stone cut from the mountain without hands and overthrowing all kingdoms. David, our Simonides, Pindar, and Alcaeus, our Flaccus too, Catullus, and Serenus, sounds of Christ on the lyre, and on the ten-stringed psaltery raises him up from the dead. Solomon, peaceful and beloved of the Lord, corrects morals, teaches nature, joins the church and Christ, and sings a sweet wedding song of holy nuptials. Esther, as a type of the church, frees the people from danger, and after Haman, whose name means 'iniquity,' is killed, hands on to later generations portions of the feast and a festal day. The book of Paralipomenon, that is, the epitome of the old covenant, is so great and of such a kind that whoever wished to claim knowledge of the Scriptures without it would make a fool of himself. For through individual names and the joining of words both histories passed over in the books of Kings are touched on and countless questions of the Gospel are explained. Ezra and Nehemiah, that is, 'helper' and 'comforter from the Lord,' are pressed into one volume: they restore the temple and build the walls of the city; and all that crowd of the people returning to their homeland, and the list of priests, Levites, Israelites, and proselytes, and the work on walls and towers divided among individual families, show one thing on the bark and keep another in the pith.

You see that, carried away by love of the Scriptures, I have exceeded the measure of a letter and yet not fulfilled what I wished. We have heard only what we ought to know and to desire, so that we too may be able to say: 'My soul has longed to desire your statutes at all times.' For the rest, that saying of Socrates is fulfilled in us: 'This only I know, that I do not know.' I will touch briefly on the New Testament too. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the Lord's four-horse team and the true cherubim, which means 'fullness of knowledge.' They have eyes all over their body, sparks flash, lightnings run to and fro, their feet are straight and reaching upward, their backs winged and flying everywhere. They hold one another and are interwoven, and like a wheel within a wheel they roll on and go wherever the breath of the Holy Spirit leads them. The apostle Paul writes to seven churches (the eighth, to the Hebrews, is placed by most outside the number); he instructs Timothy and Titus; he intercedes with Philemon for a runaway slave. About him I think it better to be silent than to say a little. The Acts of the Apostles seem to sound a bare history and to weave the infancy of the newborn church; but if we know that their writer is Luke the physician, whose praise is in the Gospel, we notice at the same time that all his words are medicines for the sick soul. James, Peter, John, and Jude published seven epistles, as mystical as they are concise, and both short and long: short in words, long in thought, so that few are not blinded in reading them. The Apocalypse of John has as many mysteries as words. I have said too little; all praise is below the merit of the book. In each single word manifold meanings lie hidden.

I beg you, dearest brother, to live among these things, to meditate on them, to know nothing else, to seek nothing else. Does it not seem to you a dwelling of the heavenly kingdom already here on earth? I do not want you to be offended in the holy Scriptures by the simplicity and, as it were, the cheapness of the words, which have been set out so either through the fault of translators or on purpose, so that they might more easily instruct a rustic congregation, and in one and the same sentence the learned might hear one thing and the unlearned another. I am not so impudent and dull as to promise that I know these things and gather on earth the fruits of those whose roots are fixed in heaven; but I confess that I wish to, I profess that I strive for it. Refusing to be your master, I pledge myself as your companion. To him who asks it is given, to him who knocks it is opened, he who seeks finds. Let us learn on earth the things whose knowledge will remain with us in heaven.

I will receive you with open arms and, to blurt out something foolish and with the bombast of Hermagoras, whatever you ask I will try to learn with you. You have here your most loving brother Eusebius, who doubled the pleasure of your letter by telling me of the uprightness of your character, your contempt for the world, your loyalty in friendship, your love of Christ. For your prudence and the charm of your style the letter itself showed even without him. Hurry, I beg you, and rather cut than untie the rope of the little boat that is stuck in the sea. No one about to renounce the world can sell well what he has despised in order to sell it. Whatever you spend of your own on expenses, count as profit. It is an old saying: 'The miser lacks what he has as much as what he does not have.' To the believer the whole world is his riches; the unbeliever lacks even a penny. Let us live as having nothing and possessing all things. Food and clothing are the riches of Christians. If you have your property in your power, sell it; if not, throw it away. 'To him who takes your tunic, the cloak too must be left.' No doubt, unless you, always putting off till tomorrow and dragging on from day to day, sell your little possessions cautiously and step by step, Christ has nothing with which to feed his poor! He who has offered himself has given everything to God. The apostles left only a boat and nets; the widow puts two coins into the treasury and is preferred to the riches of Croesus. He easily despises everything who always remembers that he is going to die.