Letters 54.1–54.18

You beseech me by letter and humbly entreat me to write back to you, or rather to write to you, how you ought to live and keep the crown of widowhood with the good name of chastity unharmed. My mind rejoices, my heart leaps, my affection exults that you desire to be after your husband's death what your mother Titiana, of holy memory, was for a long time while her husband lived. Her prayers and petitions have been heard; she has obtained in her only daughter what she herself possessed in her lifetime. You have besides this great distinction of your family, that from Camillus onward few or none of your women are recorded as having known a second marriage bed; so that you are not so much to be praised if you remain a widow as to be execrated if, as a Christian, you do not keep what pagan women kept through so many centuries.

I say nothing of Paula and Eustochium, the flowers of your stock, lest I seem to use the occasion of exhorting you to praise them; and I pass over Blesilla, who followed her husband, your brother, and in a short span of life completed a long time of virtues. Would that men imitated the praises of women, and that wrinkled old age paid back what youth offers of its own accord! Knowingly and with open eyes I put my hand into the fire: brows will be knitted, arms will be stretched out, and 'angry Chremes will rage with swelling mouth.' The nobles will rise up, and the patrician crowd will thunder against my letter, crying that I am a magician, a seducer, who ought to be transported to the ends of the earth. Let them add 'Samaritan' too, if they like, so that I may recognize my Lord's title. Certainly I do not separate a daughter from her parent, nor do I quote that saying of the Gospel, 'Let the dead bury their own dead.' For he lives who believes in Christ; and he who believes in him ought surely to walk as he walked.

Away with the ill will that the back tooth of slanderers always sinks into the Christian name, so that, fearing reproach, people do not call others to virtue. Apart from letters we do not know each other, and where there is no acquaintance in the flesh, the only motive is piety. Honor your father, but only if he does not separate you from your true Father. Recognize the bond of blood only as long as he recognizes his own Creator; otherwise David will at once sing to you: 'Hear, O daughter, and see, and incline your ear, and forget your people and your father's house; and the king will desire your beauty, for he is the Lord your God.' A great reward for forgetting a parent: 'the king will desire your beauty.' Because you have heard, because you have seen, because you have inclined your ear and forgotten your people and your father's house, therefore the king will desire your beauty and say to you: 'You are all beautiful, my love, and there is no blemish in you.' What is more beautiful than a soul that is called the daughter of God and seeks no adornments from outside? She believes in Christ and, enriched with this ambition, goes to her bridegroom, having the same one as Lord and as husband.

What straits marriage involves you have learned in marriage itself, and you have been sated, as it were, with the flesh of quails to the point of nausea. Your throat has tasted the bitterest bile; you have vomited sour and unwholesome food and relieved your burning stomach. Why do you want to take in again what was harmful to you? 'The dog returning to its vomit and the sow to its wallowing in the mire.' Even brute animals and wandering birds do not fall into the same snares and nets. Or are you afraid that the line of the Furii may fail, and that your father may not have from you a little boy to crawl on his chest and smear his neck with filth? Of course! All who have married have had children, and those to whom children were born have answered to their stock! Did Cicero's son reproduce his father in eloquence? Did your Cornelia, the model of chastity and fruitfulness alike, rejoice that she had borne her Gracchi? It is ridiculous to hope for as certain what you see many do not have, and others, when they had it, have lost. To whom will you leave such great riches? To Christ, who cannot die. Whom will you have as heir? The same one whom you have as Lord. Your father will be saddened, but Christ will rejoice; your household will mourn, but the angels will give thanks. Let your father do what he wishes with his property: you are not his to whom you were born, but his to whom you were born again, and who redeemed you at a great price, with his own blood.

Beware of nurses and maids and wine-loving creatures of that sort, who want to fill their bellies out of your hide. They do not advise what is good for you but what is good for themselves, and they often mutter that line: 'Will you waste your whole youth grieving alone, and know neither sweet children nor the rewards of Venus?' Where there is chastity and holiness, there is frugality; where there is frugality, there is loss to the servants. Whatever they do not carry off they think taken from them, and they consider not out of how much but how much they receive. Wherever they see a Christian, at once they use that street cry: 'The Greek, the impostor!' They sow the most shameful rumors and pretend they have heard from others what came from themselves, being both authors and embellishers. From this, rumor is born of a lie; and when it reaches the matrons and has been aired on their tongues, it penetrates the provinces. You may see many of them raging with rabid mouths and, with painted faces, eyes ringed like vipers, and teeth polished with pumice, carping at Christians. Here one, with a violet cloak about her shoulders, 'lisping something rancid through her nose,' makes a din and 'trips up her words with a tender palate.' The whole chorus agrees, and all the benches bark. Men of our own order join them, who are bitten and bite, talkative against us, dumb for themselves; as if they were anything other than monks, and as if whatever is said against monks did not rebound on the clergy, who are the fathers of monks. Loss to the flock is a disgrace to the shepherd; just as, on the other hand, that monk's life is praised who venerates the priests of Christ and does not disparage the order through which he was made a Christian.

I have said this, daughter in Christ, not doubting your resolve (for you would never have asked for a letter of exhortation if you were in doubt about the good of monogamy), but so that you might understand the wickedness of the servants who carry you about as something for sale, the plots of your relatives, and the loving error of your father; to whom, while I grant love for you, I do not grant knowledge of how to love, saying with the apostle: 'I confess, they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.' Imitate rather (I will repeat it often) your holy mother. Whenever I remember her, there come to mind her ardor for Christ, her pallor from fasting, her almsgiving to the poor, her service to the servants of God, her humility of heart and of dress, and her moderate speech in all things. Let your father, whom I name for honor's sake (not because he is a consular and a patrician but because he is a Christian), fulfil his name and rejoice that he has begotten a daughter for Christ, not for the world; or rather let him grieve that you have lost your virginity in vain and lost the fruits of marriage too. Where is the husband he gave you? Even if he had been lovable and good, death would have ended everything and his passing would have loosed the bond of the flesh. Seize the opportunity, I beg you, and make a virtue of necessity. In Christians it is not beginnings that are sought but ends. Paul began badly but ended well; Judas's beginnings are praised, but his end is condemned for betrayal. Read Ezekiel: 'The righteousness of the righteous will not deliver him on whatever day he sins, and the wickedness of the wicked will not harm him on whatever day he turns from his wickedness.' This is Jacob's ladder, by which the angels go up and down, on which the Lord leans, stretching out his hand to the weary and supporting the tired steps of those who climb by the sight of himself. But just as he does not desire the death of the sinner, only that he turn and live, so he hates the lukewarm, and they quickly make him sick. He to whom more is forgiven loves more.

That sinful woman in the Gospel, baptized in her own tears, was saved by wiping the Lord's feet with the hair with which she had deceived many before. She had no curled headdress, no creaking little shoes, no eyes blackened with antimony; the uglier she was, the more beautiful. What are rouge and white lead doing on a Christian woman's face? The one counterfeits the redness of cheeks and lips, the other the whiteness of face and neck: fires for young men, fuel for lusts, signs of an unchaste mind. How can she weep for her sins whose tears bare her skin and plough furrows in her face? This adornment is not the Lord's; this veil is Antichrist's. With what confidence does she lift to heaven a face that her Maker would not recognize? It is useless to plead youth and claim a girl's age: a widow who has ceased to please a husband, and who is, according to the apostle, a widow indeed, needs nothing but perseverance. She remembers her former pleasure; she knows what she has lost, what delighted her. The burning arrows of the devil must be quenched by the cold of fasting and vigils. We must either speak as we are dressed or dress as we speak. Why do we promise one thing and show another? The tongue proclaims chastity, and the whole body displays unchastity.

So much for dress and adornment. For the rest, a widow who lives in pleasure (the words are not mine but the apostle's) is dead while she lives. What does he mean by 'dead while she lives'? She seems to live to those who do not know, and not to be dead in sin, but to Christ, whom secrets do not escape, she is dead. For 'the soul that sins, it shall die.' 'The sins of some men are manifest, going before to judgment, and in some they follow after. Likewise good deeds are manifest, and those that are otherwise cannot be hidden.' What he says is of this kind: some sin so freely and openly that as soon as you see them you know them to be sinners; others, who cunningly hide their vices, we come to know from their later conduct. Likewise good deeds are in plain view in some; in others we learn them by long acquaintance. Why then need we boast of a chastity that cannot win belief without its companions and attendants, continence and frugality? The apostle mortifies his body and subjects it to the rule of the soul, lest he himself not keep what he commands others; and is a young woman, with a body heated by food, secure about her chastity?

In saying this I do not condemn foods, which God created to be used with thanksgiving; but I maintain that for young men and girls they are incentives to pleasure. Not the fires of Etna, not the land of Vulcan, not Vesuvius and Olympus burn with such heat as young marrow full of wine and inflamed with feasting. Avarice is trampled underfoot by many and laid aside with the purse; an abusive tongue is corrected by imposed silence; the care of the body and style of dress are changed in the space of an hour. All other sins are external, and what comes from outside is easily cast off; lust alone, implanted by God for the begetting of children, if it goes beyond its bounds, overflows into vice and, by a kind of law of nature, strains to break out into intercourse. It is a matter, then, of great virtue and anxious diligence to overcome what you are born with, to live in the flesh and not carnally, to fight with yourself daily, and to watch the enemy shut up within you with the hundred eyes of Argus, as the fables say. This is what the apostle said in other words: 'Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.' Physicians and those who have written on the nature of human bodies, especially Galen in his books entitled On Health, say that the bodies of boys and young men and of men and women of full age glow with innate heat, and that at these ages foods that increase heat are harmful, while it conduces to health to take everything cold in eating and drinking; just as, on the contrary, warm foods and old wines are good for old men, who suffer from phlegm and cold. Hence the Savior too says: 'Take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with surfeiting and drunkenness and the cares of this life.' And the apostle: 'wine, in which is debauchery.' No wonder the potter felt this about the vessel that he himself made, when even the comic poet, whose aim is to know and describe human manners, said: 'Without Ceres and Liber, Venus grows cold.'

First, then, if the strength of your stomach allows, until you are past a girl's years, take water to drink, which is by nature coldest; or, if weakness prevents this, hear with Timothy: 'Use a little wine for your stomach and your frequent illnesses.' Next, in your food avoid everything heating. I speak not only of meats, about which the chosen vessel gives his verdict, 'It is good not to drink wine or eat meat,' but even among vegetables all that are flatulent and heavy should be avoided; and you should know that nothing is so good for young Christians as eating greens (hence in another place he says, 'Let him who is weak eat greens'); and the heat of the body should be tempered by cooler food. If the three youths and Daniel lived on vegetables, they were youths and had not yet come to the frying pan in which the king of Babylon fried the old judges. We seek not the bloom of the body, which in them (apart from the special gift of God's grace) shone out from food of this kind, but the vigor of the soul, which grows stronger through the weakness of the flesh. That is why some who aim at a chaste life fall in the middle of the road, thinking abstinence from meat is everything and loading their stomachs with vegetables, which are harmless when taken moderately and sparingly. And, to say what I think, nothing so inflames the body and tickles the genital members as undigested food and convulsive belching. I would rather put my modesty at risk with you for a moment, daughter, than my case. Whatever is a seedbed of pleasures, count it poison. Let sparing food and a stomach always hungry be preferred to three-day fasts; and it is much better to take a little daily than enough rarely. That rain is best which falls gently on the earth; a sudden and excessive downpour washes away the fields headlong.

When you eat, think that you must pray immediately afterwards and read at once. Have a fixed number of verses of the holy Scriptures; render this task to your Lord, and do not give your limbs to rest before you have filled the basket of your breast with this weft. After the holy Scriptures read the treatises of learned men, but only of those whose faith is known. You need not look for gold in the mud; buy the one pearl with many pearls. Stand with Jeremiah in many ways, so that you may come to that way which leads to the Father. Transfer your love of necklaces, jewels, and silk garments to the knowledge of the Scriptures. Enter the land of promise flowing with milk and honey; eat fine flour and oil; be clothed with Joseph in garments of many colors; let your ears be pierced with Jerusalem by the word of God, so that precious grains of new harvests may hang from them. You have the holy Exsuperius, of proven age and faith, to instruct you often with his counsel.

Make friends for yourself with unrighteous mammon, so that they may receive you into eternal dwellings. Give your riches to those who buy not pheasants but coarse bread, who drive out hunger, not increase luxury. Consider the needy and the poor. Give to everyone who asks you, but above all to those of the household of faith: clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the sick. Whenever you stretch out your hand, think of Christ. Beware, while your Lord is begging, of increasing the riches of others.

Flee the company of young men. Let the roof of your house not see curled, dandified, and wanton youths. Let the singer be driven away as harmful; drive out of your house women who play the lyre and the harp and that whole chorus of the devil, like the deadly songs of the Sirens. Do not go out into public often, or be carried about with the liberty of widows, with an army of eunuchs going before you. It is a very bad habit when the frail sex and a weak age abuse their own discretion and think whatever they please is lawful. 'All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient.' Let no curled steward, no handsome foster brother, no fair and ruddy attendant cling to your side: sometimes the mind of the mistress is judged by the dress of her maids. Seek the company of holy virgins and widows; and if you must speak with men, do not avoid witnesses, and let your confidence in conversation be such that if another comes in you neither tremble nor blush. The face is the mirror of the mind, and silent eyes confess the secrets of the heart. We saw lately a disgraceful creature fluttering through the whole East: his age, his dress, his manners, his gait, his indiscriminate company, his exquisite feasts, his royal state bespoke the marriage of Nero and Sardanapalus. Let another's wound be our warning; when the pestilent man is flogged, the fool will be wiser. Holy love has no impatience; a false rumor is soon crushed, and the later life judges the earlier. It is not possible for anyone to pass through the course of this life without the bites of men; and it is the consolation of the bad to carp at the good, since they think the fault of sinners is lessened by their number. Yet a fire in stubble soon dies down, and an overflowing flame gradually dies when its fuel fails; if rumor lied last year, or if it spoke the truth, let the vice cease, and the rumor will cease. I say this not because I fear anything wrong in you, but because, out of loving care, I fear even what is safe. O, if you could see your sister, and hear in person the eloquence of her holy lips, you would see a great soul in a small body, you would hear the whole furniture of the Old and New Testaments bubbling up from her heart. She takes fasting as play, prayer as delight. She holds the timbrel after the example of Miriam and, with Pharaoh drowned, leads the chorus of virgins: 'Let us sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.' These she teaches to be psalm singers for Christ, these she trains as harpists for the Savior. So day and night are spent, and with oil ready for the lamps the bridegroom's coming is awaited. Imitate your kinswoman, then: let Rome have what Bethlehem, smaller than the city of Rome, possesses.

You have wealth; it is easy for you to supply the needy with means of living. Let virtue spend what was prepared for luxury; no woman who is going to despise marriage need fear poverty. Ransom virgins whom you may lead into the Savior's bedchamber; take in widows, whom you may mix like violets among the lilies of the virgins and the roses of the martyrs. In place of the crown of thorns in which Christ bore the sins of the world, weave such garlands. Let the most noble man, your father, rejoice and help; let him learn from his daughter what he had learned from his wife. His head is already white, his knees tremble, his teeth fall out, and old age ploughs his brow with wrinkles; death is near, at the door; the pyre is being marked out close by. Whether we like it or not, we are old. Let him prepare for himself the provision needed for a long journey. Let him take with him what he will leave against his will; or rather, let him send ahead to heaven what the earth will take unless he takes care.

Young widows, some of whom have turned aside after Satan when they have grown wanton against Christ, are accustomed to say in their heat: 'My little inheritance is wasting daily, my ancestral estate is being squandered, a slave has spoken insolently, a maid has ignored my orders. Who will go out in public for me? Who will answer for the taxes on the land? Who will teach my little ones? Who will bring up my house slaves?' And (shame!) they put forward as a reason for marrying the very thing that by itself ought to have prevented marriage. A mother brings upon her children not a stepfather but an enemy, not a parent but a tyrant. Inflamed with lust, she forgets her own womb, and among her little ones, who do not understand their misery, she who was lately mourning is dressed up as a new bride. Why do you plead your inheritance, the insolence of your slaves? Confess your shame. No woman takes a husband in order not to sleep with her husband. Or, if lust at least does not goad you, what madness is it to prostitute chastity like harlots in order to increase riches, and for a cheap and perishable thing to defile chastity, which is both precious and eternal? If you have children, why do you want marriage? If you have none, why do you not fear the barrenness you have experienced, and prefer an uncertain thing to certain modesty? Now marriage settlements are written for you, so that a little later you may be compelled to make a will. Your husband will feign illness, and what he wants you to do as one about to die, he will do as one who is going to live. Or if it happens that you have children by the second husband too, there will be war at home, strife within. You will not be allowed to love your children or look with equal eyes on those you bore. You will hand them food secretly; he will be jealous of the dead man, and unless you hate your children, you will seem still to love their father. But if he has children by a former wife and brings you into the house, even if you are most kind, all the comedies and mime writers and the commonplaces of the rhetoricians will declaim against you as the cruellest stepmother. If your stepson falls ill and has a headache, you will be defamed as a poisoner. If you do not give him food, you will be called cruel; if you do, a witch. I ask you, what good do second marriages have so great that they can outweigh these evils?

Do we want to know what widows should be like? Let us read the Gospel according to Luke: 'And there was,' he says, 'Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher.' Anna means 'grace'; Phanuel in our language sounds 'the face of God'; Asher is rendered either 'blessedness' or 'riches.' Because, then, from her youth until eighty-four years she had borne the burden of widowhood and did not depart from the temple of God, persisting day and night in fasting and supplications, she deserved spiritual grace, is called the daughter of the face of God, and is reckoned in the blessedness and riches of her ancestry. Let us remember the widow of Zarephath, who put Elijah's hunger before her own and her son's safety, and who, about to die that very night with her son, was leaving her guest to survive, preferring to lose her life rather than her almsgiving; and in a handful of meal she prepared for herself the seed of the Lord's harvest. Meal is sown, and a jar of oil springs up. In Judea there was a famine of grain (for there the grain of wheat had died), and in the widow of the Gentiles streams of oil were flowing. We read of Judith (if anyone is willing to accept the book), a widow worn out with fasting and soiled in mourning dress, who did not mourn her dead husband, but by the squalor of her body sought the bridegroom's coming. I see the hand armed with the sword, the bloody right hand; I recognize the head of Holofernes brought back from the midst of the enemy. A woman conquers men, chastity beheads lust; and, suddenly changing her dress, she returns to her victorious squalor, cleaner than all the adornments of the world.

Some ignorantly count Deborah among the widows and think that Barak, the leader, was Deborah's son, though Scripture says otherwise. We will name her here because she was a prophetess and is reckoned in the order of the judges. And because she could say, 'How sweet are your words to my throat, sweeter than honey and the honeycomb to my mouth,' she received the name of 'bee,' fed on the flowers of the Scriptures, steeped in the fragrance of the Holy Spirit, and compounding with her prophetic mouth the sweet juices of ambrosia. Naomi, whose name in our language means 'comforted' (παρακεκλημένη), after her husband and sons died abroad, brought her chastity back to her homeland and, sustained by this provision for the journey, kept her Moabite daughter-in-law, so that the prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled: 'Send forth the lamb, O Lord, the ruler of the earth, from the rock of the desert.' I come to the widow of the Gospel, the poor little widow, richer than all the people of Israel, who, receiving a grain of mustard seed and putting leaven into three measures of meal, tempered the confession of the Father and the Son with the grace of the Holy Spirit, and put two mites into the treasury: all that she could have in her substance, and she offered all her riches in the two testaments of her faith. These are the two seraphim, thrice glorifying the Trinity, laid up in the treasury of the church; from which too a burning coal, taken with the tongs of the two testaments, purges the lips of the sinner.

Why should I repeat old stories and bring forward women's virtues from books, when you can set before your eyes many in the city where you live whose example you ought to imitate? And lest I seem to run through them one by one in flattery, the holy Marcella is enough for you; living up to her family, she has brought back to us something of the Gospel. Anna lived seven years with her husband from her virginity, Marcella seven months. Anna waited for Christ's coming; Marcella holds him whom Anna received. Anna sang of him as a crying infant; Marcella proclaims him triumphant. Anna spoke of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem; Marcella cries out with the redeemed nations: 'A brother does not redeem; shall a man redeem?' and, from another psalm: 'A man was born in her, and the Most High himself founded her.' I know that about two years ago I published books against Jovinian, in which I crushed by the authority of the Scriptures the objections raised on the other side from the places where the apostle permits second marriages. There is no need to write the same things again from the beginning, since you can borrow from there what has been written. This only, so as not to exceed the measure of a letter, I would have you keep in mind: think daily that you are going to die, and you will never think of a second marriage.