Letters 55.1–56.5

A short letter cannot explain long questions, and, compressing much into a narrow space, it must bind in words what is broad in meaning. You ask what is meant by that saying in the Gospel according to Matthew: 'Do not be anxious about tomorrow; sufficient for the day is its own evil.' In the holy Scriptures 'tomorrow' signifies future time, as Jacob says in Genesis, 'My righteousness will answer for me tomorrow'; and where an altar is built by the two tribes of Reuben and Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh, and an embassy is sent to them by all Israel, they answer Phinehas the high priest that they made the altar so that tomorrow their children might not be denied a share in the worship of God. You will find many things of this kind in the Old Testament. He, then, who forbade us to think about the future allowed us to think about the present, because of the frailty of human life. And as for his saying, 'Sufficient for the day is its own evil,' understand it in this way: it is enough for us to think about the present troubles of this age; what need is there to stretch our minds to uncertain and future things, which we either cannot attain or perhaps, having found them, may quickly lose? For κακία, which the Latin renders 'malitia' (evil), means two things among the Greeks, both evil and affliction, which the Greeks call κάκωσις; and here it should rather have been translated 'affliction' than 'evil.' But if anyone contentiously insists that κακία does not mean affliction and distress but evil, it must be explained in the sense in which the world 'lies in the evil one,' that is, in evil (and in the Lord's Prayer we say, 'Deliver us from evil'), and then let it be enough for us to have the present struggle against the evil of this age.

In the second place you set out a question from the blessed apostle Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, where he says: 'Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body.' Let us read a little further up, and so come to these words, lest we try to learn the whole meaning from the last parts, from the tail, so to say, of the section. 'The body,' he says, 'is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God, who raised the Lord, has raised us too with him by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Far from it. Or do you not know that he who joins himself to a harlot is one body? "The two," he says, "shall be in one flesh." But he who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit. Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man commits is outside the body; but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body,' and so on. The holy apostle, arguing against luxury and saying above, 'Food for the belly and the belly for food; but God will destroy both the one and the other,' comes next to sexual immorality. For luxury is the mother of lust, and the pleasure of the genitals follows the belly distended with food and drenched with drafts of wine; and, so to speak, the order of the vices must follow the order of the members. So every sin, for example theft, murder, robbery, perjury, and the like, brings regret after the deed, and though gain may entice, conscience still bites; pleasure alone and lust suffer their former goads even at the very time of repentance, the tickling of the flesh and the incentives to sin, so that through the very things we think about, wishing to correct them, there is again matter for sinning. Another explanation: other sins are external, for whatever we do, we do to others; sexual immorality stains not only the conscience of the one who commits it but the very body, and, according to the Lord's sentence, in which he says, 'For this reason a man shall leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh,' he too becomes one body with the harlot and sins against his own body, while he makes the temple of Christ the body of a harlot. Let us give yet another explanation, so as not to seem to pass over any opinion of the Greeks: it is one thing to sin through the body, another in the body. Theft, murder, and the other sins apart from sexual immorality we carry out externally through our hands; sexual immorality alone is practised by us in our body, not through the body on others; and the preposition 'through' denotes instrumentality, 'in' denotes something suffered in oneself. There are also some who argue that, according to holy Scripture, the wife is the husband's body, and whoever has committed sexual immorality sins against his own body, that is, against his wife, since he defiles her by his immorality and makes her, though she has not sinned, sin through union with him.

The third and last question was from the same epistle of the apostle, where, discussing the resurrection, he comes to the place where it is written: 'For he must reign until he puts all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. But when he says that all things are subjected to him, it is plain that he is excepted who subjected all things to him. And when all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subjected to him who subjected all things to himself, so that God may be all in all.' I am surprised that you wished to ask me this, since the holy Hilary, bishop of Poitiers, filled the eleventh book of his work against the Arians with this question and its solution. Still, let us say at least a little. The whole stumbling block here is why the Son is said to be subject to the Father. Which is more shameful or lower: to be subject to the Father (which is often a mark of piety, and it is written in the psalm, 'Shall not my soul be subject to God?') or to be crucified and become the curse of the cross? For 'cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.' Do you wonder, then, if he who was made a curse for us, to free us from the curse, is subject for us, to make us subject to the Father, saying in the Gospel, 'No one goes to the Father except through me,' and, 'When I am lifted up, I will draw all things to myself'? Christ is subject to the Father in those who are faithful, because all believers, or rather the whole human race, are reckoned members of his body. But in those who do not believe, that is, Jews, pagans, and heretics, he is said to be unsubjected, because a part of his members is not subject to faith. But at the end of the world, when all the members see Christ, that is, their own body, reigning, they too will be subjected to Christ, that is, to their own body, so that the whole body of Christ may be subjected to God and the Father, and God may be all in all. He does not say, 'so that the Father may be all in all,' but 'God,' which is the proper name of the Trinity and can be referred to the Father as well as to the Son and the Holy Spirit, so that humanity may be subjected to divinity. By humanity in this place we mean not gentleness and kindness, which the Greeks call φιλανθρωπία, but the whole human race. Further, his saying, 'so that God may be all in all,' must be understood in this sense: the Lord and Savior is now not all in all, but a part in each (for example, in Solomon wisdom, in David goodness, in Job patience, in Daniel knowledge of the future, in Peter faith, in Phinehas and Paul zeal, in John virginity, in others other things); but when the end of all things has come, then he will be all in all, so that each of the saints may have all the virtues and Christ may be wholly in all.

I found attached to your letter and your little commentary a short note, in which this was written: 'He is to be asked (that is, I) whether a woman who has left a husband who was an adulterer and a sodomite, and has accepted another man under compulsion, can communicate with the church without penance while the one she first left is still living.' Reading this, I remembered that verse: 'to make excuses in sins.' For all of us men favor our own vices, and what we do by our own will we attribute to the necessity of nature. It is as if a young man were to say: 'I suffer violence from my body; burning heat drives me to lust; the very organs of the genitals and the make-up of the body seek a woman's embraces'; or again a murderer: 'I was in need,' he says; 'I lacked food, I had no covering for my body; so I shed another's blood, so as not to die myself of hunger and cold.' Answer, then, the sister who asks us about her state, not with our judgment but with the apostle's: 'Do you not know, brothers (for I speak to those who know the law), that the law rules over a man as long as he lives? For the woman who is under a husband is bound by the law while her husband lives; but if her husband dies, she is freed from the law of the husband. So, while her husband lives, she will be an adulteress if she takes another man.' And in another place: 'A wife is bound for as long as her husband lives; but if her husband falls asleep, she is freed: let her marry whom she will, only in the Lord.' Cutting off all pretexts, the apostle has defined most plainly that a woman who marries another while her husband lives is an adulteress. Do not bring up to me the abductor and violence, a mother's persuasion, a father's authority, the crowds of relatives, the plots and contempt of servants, losses to the household property: as long as the husband lives, even if he is an adulterer, even if a sodomite, even if covered with every crime and abandoned by his wife because of these crimes, he is reckoned her husband, and she may not take another man. Nor does the apostle decree this by his own authority, but with Christ speaking in him he speaks the words of Christ, who says in the Gospel: 'Whoever puts away his wife, except for the cause of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery; and whoever takes one who has been put away is an adulterer.' Notice what he says: 'Whoever takes one who has been put away is an adulterer.' Whether she has put away her husband or has been put away by her husband, the one who takes her is an adulterer. Hence the apostles too, understanding the heavy burden of marriage, say: 'If this is so, it is not expedient for a man to take a wife.' To them the Lord says, 'Let him who can receive it receive it,' and immediately, by the example of the three kinds of eunuchs, he brings in the blessedness of virginity, which is held by no law of the flesh.

Nor could I well make out what she meant by saying, 'having accepted another man under compulsion.' What is this, 'accepted under compulsion'? Did he, forsooth, gather a crowd and carry her off against her will? And why, afterwards, did the woman carried off not put away her abductor? Let her read the books of Moses, and she will find that a betrothed woman, if she was violated in the city and did not cry out, is punished as an adulteress, but if in the field, she is innocent of the crime. So this sister, who, as she says, suffered compulsion to be joined to another, if she wishes to receive the body of Christ and not be thought an adulteress, let her do penance, but only on condition that from the time of her penance she does not have intercourse with the second man, who is not called a husband but an adulterer. If this seems hard to her, and she cannot leave him or put the Lord before pleasure, let her hear the apostle crying out: 'You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons,' and in another place: 'What fellowship has light with darkness? What agreement has Christ with Belial?' I will say something new, or rather not new but old, confirmed by the authority of the Old Testament. If she leaves the second husband and wishes to be reconciled to the first, she cannot. For it is written in Deuteronomy: 'If a man takes a wife and has her, and she does not find favor in his sight because of some uncleanness, he shall write her a bill of divorce and put it in her hand and send her out of his house. And when she has gone out and married another husband, and he too hates her and gives her a bill of divorce and sends her out of his house, or dies, the husband cannot take her back as his wife, because she has been defiled and has become abominable before the Lord; do not cause your land to sin, which the Lord your God has given you to possess.' Therefore I beg you to console her, or rather to call her to salvation. Putrid flesh needs the knife and cautery; and the fault is not the medicine's but the wound's, when the physician with merciful cruelty does not spare, and is severe in order to spare, harsh in order to show mercy.

[Augustine to Jerome.] No one has ever become as well known to anyone by his face as you have become known to me by the quiet joy and truly liberal exercise of your studies in the Lord. Though, then, I greatly long to know you completely, still I lack only a small part of you, namely your bodily presence. And even this, I cannot deny, has been largely impressed upon me by the report of brother Alypius, now a most blessed bishop but then already worthy of the episcopate, after he saw you and, on his return, was seen by me; and before his return, when he was seeing you there, I was seeing you too, but with his eyes. For anyone who knew us would say that he and I are two not in mind but only in body, in harmony, that is, and most faithful friendship, not in merits, in which he excels. Since, then, you love me first by the fellowship of the spirit, in which we strive toward unity, and then from his lips, it is by no means impudent of me, as though I were some stranger, to commend to your brotherliness our brother Profuturus, who we hope will prove truly profitable, first through our efforts and then through your help; unless perhaps he is such that I shall become more commended to you through him than he through me. Perhaps I ought to have written only thus far, if I wished to be content with the custom of formal letters; but my mind overflows with things to share with you in conversation about our studies, which we have in Christ Jesus our Lord, who deigns to supply us abundantly, through your love too, with many benefits and provisions for the journey he has shown us.

We ask, then, and the whole studious fellowship of the African churches asks with us, that you not be reluctant to spend care and effort on translating the books of those who have treated our Scriptures best in Greek. For you can make it possible for us too to have such men, and one above all, whom you sound more gladly in your writings. But as for translating the holy canonical writings into Latin, I would not want you to labor at it except in the way you translated Job, so that, by the use of signs, it may be seen how your translation differs from that of the Seventy, whose authority is very weighty. I cannot sufficiently wonder if anything is still found in the Hebrew copies that has escaped so many translators most skilled in that language. I leave aside the Seventy, about whose greater agreement of counsel or of spirit, greater than if they had been one man, I do not dare pronounce a firm judgment either way, except that I think pre-eminent authority in this work must be granted them without dispute. I am more moved by those who, translating later and holding, as is said, more closely to the way and rules of Hebrew words and expressions, not only did not agree among themselves but also left many things that remained to be dug out and brought to light so long afterwards. For if they are obscure, it is believed that you too may be mistaken in them; if they are plain, it is not believed that they could have been mistaken in them. I would ask you, then, of your love, to set out the reasons for this and make me certain.

I have also read some writings, said to be yours, on the epistles of the apostle Paul; and when you wished to explain the epistle to the Galatians, you came to the passage in which the apostle Peter is called back from harmful pretence. I confess that I grieve not a little that there the defense of lying has been taken up, whether by you, such a man, or by someone else, if another wrote it, until the things that trouble me are refuted, if perhaps they can be refuted. For it seems to me most disastrous to believe that there is any lie in the holy books, that is, that the men through whom that Scripture was ministered to us and written down lied in anything in their books. It is one question whether it is ever the part of a good man to lie, and another whether a writer of the holy Scriptures ought to have lied; or rather, not another question but no question at all. For once any 'useful' lie is admitted into so high a summit of authority, no little part of those books will remain which, whenever it seems to anyone hard for morals or incredible for faith, will not be referred by the same most pernicious rule to the design and duty of a lying author. For if the apostle Paul was lying when, rebuking the apostle Peter, he said, 'If you, though a Jew, live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?', and if Peter seemed to him to have acted rightly, whom he both said and wrote had not acted rightly, merely to soothe the minds of those who were in uproar, what shall we answer when perverse men arise forbidding marriage, as he himself foretold they would, and say that everything the same apostle said about establishing the rights of marriage was a lie told on account of men who might make an uproar out of love for their wives, not because he thought so, but to placate their opposition? There is no need to mention many things. For even about the praises of God there can seem to be useful lies, so that love of him may be kindled in more sluggish men; and so nowhere in the holy books will the authority of pure truth be certain. Do we not note the same apostle saying, with great care to commend the truth: 'If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. And we are found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise'? If someone said to him, 'Why do you shudder at this lie, since you would be saying something that, even if false, pertains greatly to the praise of God?', would he not, detesting that man's madness, open to the light the recesses of his heart with whatever words and signs he could, crying out that it is no less a crime, or perhaps even a greater one, to praise God with a falsehood than to disparage the truth? We must therefore see to it that the man who approaches the knowledge of the divine Scriptures is one who thinks of the holy books so holily and truthfully that he would not wish to take pleasure in any part of them through useful lies, and would rather pass over what he does not understand than prefer his own heart to that truth. For surely, when he says this, he asks to be believed, and brings it about that we do not believe the authority of the divine Scriptures.

For my part, with whatever strength the Lord supplies, I would show that all those testimonies brought forward to establish the usefulness of lying ought to be understood otherwise, so that their firm truth might be taught everywhere. For as testimonies ought not to be lies, so they ought not to favor lying. But I leave this to your understanding. For if you apply more careful consideration to your reading, you will perhaps see it much more easily than I. To this consideration your piety will compel you, by which you recognize that the authority of the divine Scriptures would waver, so that in them each would believe what he wishes and not believe what he does not wish, if once it were accepted that the men through whom these things were ministered to us could have told useful lies in their writings; unless perhaps you are going to give some rules by which we may know where lying is proper and where it is not. If that can be done, I beg you by the most truthful humanity of our Lord not to explain it by lying and doubtful reasons, and not to judge me burdensome or impudent. For my error favoring the truth is, I will not say no fault, but certainly no great fault, if truth can rightly favor a lie in you.

I would like to speak of many other things with your most sincere heart and to confer about Christian study, but no letter is enough for this desire of mine. I can do so more fully through the brother whom I rejoice to have sent to share in and be nourished by your sweet and useful conversations. And yet even he, if I may say so with his leave, perhaps does not take in as much as I would wish, though I would in no way prefer myself to him. For I confess that I have more capacity for you, but I see that he is becoming fuller, in which he undoubtedly surpasses me; and after he returns, which with the Lord's help I hope will be prosperous, when I share in his heart filled by you, he will not fill what will still be empty in me and eager for your thoughts. So it will be that I shall then be even poorer, he richer. This brother is bringing with him some writings of ours; if you deign to read them, I beg you to apply a sincere and brotherly severity too. For I do not understand otherwise what is written: 'The righteous man will correct me in mercy and rebuke me; but let not the oil of the sinner anoint my head,' except that the one who reproves to heal loves more than the flatterer who anoints the head. For my part, I read what I have written as a good judge only with great difficulty, being either more timid or more eager than is right. I sometimes see my faults, but I prefer to hear of them from better men, lest, having perhaps rightly reproved myself, I flatter myself again and seem to have passed a sentence on myself that was fearful rather than just.