Letters 60.5–60.19

What are we doing, my soul? Where are we turning? What shall we take up first? What shall we pass over? You have forgotten the rules of the rhetoricians, and, taken up with grief, overwhelmed with tears, hindered by sobs, you do not keep the order of speaking! Where is that devotion to letters from childhood, and that ever-praised saying of Anaxagoras and Telamon, 'I knew that I had begotten a mortal'? We have read Crantor, whose volume Cicero followed to soothe his own grief. We have run through the little works of Plato, Diogenes, Clitomachus, Carneades, and Posidonius for calming grief, who at different times tried to lessen the laments of different people by books or letters; so that, even if our own talent dried up, it could be watered from their springs. They put forward countless men, especially Pericles and Xenophon the Socratic. The first, having lost two sons, spoke in the assembly wearing a garland; the second, when he heard while sacrificing that his son had been killed in war, is said to have laid aside his garland and put it back on his head after he learned that he had fallen fighting bravely in the line. Why should I mention the Roman generals, by whose virtues Latin histories shine as with stars? Pulvillus, dedicating the Capitol, when his son was suddenly reported dead, ordered him to be buried in his absence. Lucius Paulus, between the funerals of his two sons within seven days, entered the city in triumph. I pass over the Maximi, the Catos, the Galli, the Pisos, the Bruti, the Scaevolae, the Metelli, the Scauri, the Marii, the Crassi, the Marcelli, and the Aufidii, whose courage was no less in mourning than in war, and whose bereavements Tully set out in his book of Consolation; lest I seem to have sought others' examples rather than our own. And yet let even these things be said briefly to our reproach, if faith does not supply what unbelief displayed.

Let us come, then, to our own. I will not lament with Jacob and David sons dying under the law, but with Christ in the Gospel I will receive them rising. The mourning of the Jews is the joy of Christians. 'Weeping will linger in the evening, and joy in the morning.' 'The night is far spent, and the day is at hand.' Hence Moses too is mourned when he dies, while Jesus son of Nun is buried on the mountain without funeral rites and tears. Whatever can be said from the Scriptures about lamentation I set out briefly in the book in which I consoled Paula at Rome. Now we must reach the same place by another path, lest we seem to tread again in old and worn-out footsteps.

We know, indeed, that our Nepotian is with Christ and mingled with the choirs of the saints, and that what he searched out from afar with us here on earth and sought by conjecture, there, seeing it close at hand, he says: 'As we have heard, so we have seen, in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God.' But we cannot bear the longing for him in his absence, grieving not for his lot but for ours. The happier he is, the greater our grief at lacking such a good. The sisters too wept for Lazarus, whom they knew would rise again; and, to show the true feelings of a man, the Savior himself wept for him whom he was about to raise. His apostle too, who had said, 'I desire to depart and be with Christ,' and elsewhere, 'To me to live is Christ and to die is gain,' gives thanks that Epaphras was given back to him from the nearness of death, lest he should have sorrow upon sorrow, not from fear of unbelief but from longing love. How much more do you, both uncle and bishop, that is, father both in the flesh and in the spirit, long for your own flesh and sigh as though it had been torn from you! But I beg you to set a limit to grief, remembering that saying, 'Nothing too much,' and, having bound up the wound for a little, to hear the praises of him in whose virtue you always rejoiced; do not grieve that you have lost such a man, but rejoice that you had him. And as those who paint the positions of lands on a small tablet, so in this little volume see the outlines, not the finished portraits, of his virtues, and accept from us not our strength but our good will.

It is a rule of the rhetoricians that the ancestors of the one to be praised, and their deeds, be traced from far back, and so the speech arrive at him by degrees, so that he may be made more illustrious by the virtues of his grandfathers and father, and may seem either not to have degenerated from the good or to have adorned the mediocre himself. I will not look for the goods of the flesh, which he himself always despised, in praising his soul, nor boast of his family, that is, of the goods of others; since Abraham and Isaac, holy men, begot Ishmael and Esau, sinners, and, on the other hand, Jephthah, numbered by the voice of the apostle in the catalogue of the righteous, was born of a harlot. 'The soul,' it says, 'that sins, it shall die'; therefore the soul that does not sin shall live. Neither the virtues nor the vices of parents are imputed to children; we are reckoned from the time we are born again in Christ. Paul, the persecutor of the church and the ravening wolf of Benjamin in the morning, in the evening gave food, submitting his head to Ananias the sheep. So let our Nepotian too, like a crying infant and an untaught child, be suddenly born to us from the Jordan.

Another writer might perhaps write that for his sake you left the East and the desert and deceived me, your dearest companion, with the hope of your return, so as to save first, if possible, your widowed sister with her little son, and then, if she rejected your advice, at least your sweetest nephew. For he is the one of whom I once prophesied to you: 'Though your little nephew hang on your neck.' Another, I say, would relate that in the palace service, under the cloak and white linen, his body was worn by haircloth; that standing before the powers of the world he carried a face pale with fasting; that while still wearing the dress of one master he served another, and had his soldier's belt only so as to help widows, orphans, the oppressed, and the wretched. For my part I do not like these delays of an imperfect service of God; and when I read that the centurion Cornelius was righteous, I immediately hear that he was baptized.

Still, let us approve these as the cradle, so to speak, of a newborn faith, so that he who was a devoted soldier under another's standards may be rewarded with the laurel after he began to serve his own King. Laying aside his belt and changing his dress, he gave to the poor whatever he had of his soldier's savings. For he had read: 'He who wishes to be perfect, let him sell all that he has and give to the poor and follow me,' and again, 'You cannot serve two masters, God and mammon.' Except for a cheap tunic and a similar covering, enough to keep out the cold by covering his body, he kept nothing more for himself. His dress, following the custom of the province, was noticeable neither for elegance nor for squalor. And though he burned daily either to go to the monasteries of Egypt or to visit the communities of Mesopotamia, or at least to occupy the solitudes of the islands of Dalmatia, which are separated from Altinum only by a strait, he did not dare to leave his uncle the bishop, seeing in him every example of virtue and having at home one from whom to learn. In one and the same man he both imitated the monk and revered the bishop. Constant intercourse did not, as usually happens with most people, breed familiarity, nor familiarity contempt; but he honored him as a parent and admired him as if he saw him new every day. In short, he becomes a cleric and, through the usual grades, is ordained presbyter. Good Jesus, what groans, what wailing, what refusal of food, what avoidance of all eyes! Then for the first and only time he was angry with his uncle. He complained that he could not bear the burden, and pleaded that his youth was unsuited to the priesthood. But the more he resisted, the more he stirred everyone's zeal for him, and by refusing he deserved what he did not want to be, and he was the more worthy because he cried that he was unworthy. We saw a Timothy of our own time, and grey hairs as Wisdom speaks of them, and a presbyter chosen by Moses, whom he himself knew to be a presbyter. So, understanding the clerical office not as an honor but as a burden, his first care was to overcome envy by humility, and then to give no occasion for any foul rumor about himself, so that those who carped at his age might be astonished at his continence. To help the poor, visit the sick, invite to hospitality, soothe with kindness, rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep: he was a staff to the blind, food to the hungry, hope to the wretched, comfort to the mourning. He excelled in each single virtue as if he had no others. Among the presbyters and his equals he was first in work, last in rank. Whatever good he had done he credited to his uncle; if anything turned out otherwise than he had expected, he said that his uncle did not know of it and that he himself had erred. In public he knew him as bishop, at home as father. He tempered the gravity of his manners with a cheerful face; you would recognize his joy by a smile, not by loud laughter. Widows and virgins of Christ he honored as mothers and exhorted as sisters, in all chastity. And when he had gone home, and, leaving the cleric outside, had given himself to the hardships of the monks, he was frequent in prayer, watchful in supplication, and offered his tears to God, not to men; he regulated his fasts, like a charioteer, according to the fatigue and strength of his body. He was present at his uncle's table and so tasted whatever was set before him as both to avoid superstition and to preserve continence. His conversation at every meal was to propose something from the Scriptures, to listen gladly, to answer modestly, to accept what was right, to refute what was wrong without harshness, to teach rather than defeat one who argued against him, and, with the frank modesty that adorned his age, to acknowledge simply whose each opinion was; and in this way, by declining the glory of learning, he was thought most learned. 'That,' he would say, 'is Tertullian's; this is Cyprian's; this Lactantius's; that Hilary's. So Minucius Felix, so Victorinus; in this way Arnobius spoke.' Me too, because he loved me for my friendship with his uncle, he sometimes brought forward. By constant reading and long meditation he had made his breast a library of Christ.

How often he begged me in letters from across the sea to write something for him! How often he played before me the part of the one in the Gospel who knocks at night, and of the widow who importunes the harsh judge! And when I refused by silence rather than by letter, and by the modesty of my silence brought a blush to the modesty of his request, he set his uncle before me as an intercessor, who could ask more freely for another and, out of reverence for his priesthood, obtain more easily. So I did what he wanted, and in a short book consecrated our friendship to eternal memory. When he received it he boasted that he had surpassed the wealth of Croesus and the riches of Darius. He held it with his eyes, in his bosom, in his hands, on his lips; and when he often unrolled it in bed, the sweet page would fall on the breast of the sleeper. If any stranger or friend came, he rejoiced over my testimony to him, and whatever was lacking in the little work he made up for by measured phrasing and variety of delivery, so that in reading it aloud he himself seemed daily either to please or to displease. Whence this ardor, if not from the love of God? Whence the untiring meditation on the law of Christ, if not from longing for him who gave the law? Let others add coin to coin, and, stuffing their purses, hunt the wealth of matrons by their attentions; let them be richer as monks than they were in the world; let them possess wealth under a poor Christ which they did not have under a rich devil; and let the church sigh over as rich those whom the world held as beggars before. Our Nepotian, trampling on gold, pursued books; but, as he despised himself in the flesh and walked the more adorned for his poverty, so he sought out every adornment for the church.

In comparison with what went before, what we are about to say is small; but the same spirit is shown in small things too. For as we admire the Creator not only in heaven and earth, sun and ocean, elephants, camels, horses, oxen, leopards, bears, and lions, but also in the tiny creatures, the ant, the gnat, flies, worms, and that kind, whose bodies we know better than their names, and revere the same skill in all, so a mind devoted to Christ is attentive equally to greater and lesser things, knowing that account must be given even for an idle word. So he was careful that the altar shone, that the walls were free of soot, the floors swept, the doorkeeper constantly at the door, the curtains always at the entrances, the sanctuary clean, the vessels gleaming; and his devout care, extended to all the ceremonies, neglected no duty, small or great. Wherever you looked for him in the church, you would find him. Antiquity admires the noble Quintus Fabius, who was also a writer of Roman history, but who got his name more from painting than from letters; and Scripture testifies that our Bezalel was full of wisdom and the Spirit of God, and Hiram too, the son of a Tyrian woman, because the one made the furnishings of the tabernacle, the other of the temple. For as glad crops and fertile fields sometimes run riot in stalks and ears, so brilliant minds and a soul full of virtues overflow into the elegance of various arts. Hence too among the Greeks that philosopher is praised who boasted that everything he used, down to his cloak and his ring, was made by his own hand. The same we can say of this man, who shaded the basilicas of the church and the meeting places of the martyrs with various flowers, leafy branches, and vine tendrils, so that whatever pleased in the church, both in arrangement and in appearance, bore witness to the labor and zeal of the presbyter.

Well done! If such was the beginning, what would the end have been? O wretched human condition, and how empty is all our life without Christ! Why do you draw back, why do you shrink, my speech? As if we could put off his death and make his life longer, we are afraid to come to the end. 'All flesh is grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass.' Where now is that comely face, where the dignity of his whole body, with which, as with a beautiful garment, the beauty of his soul was clothed? The lily, alas, was withering as the south wind blew, and the purple of the violet was fading little by little into pallor. And while he burned with fever and the heat drained the springs of his veins, with weary breath he consoled his sad uncle. His face was glad, and while all around him wept, he alone smiled. He threw back his cloak, stretched out his hands, saw what others did not see, and, rising as if to meet them, greeted those who came: you would have understood that he was not dying but departing, and changing his friends, not leaving them. Tears roll down my face, and, though I steel my mind, I cannot hide the grief I suffer. Who would believe that at such a moment he remembered our friendship, and, while his soul struggled, knew the sweetness of our studies? Taking his uncle's hand, he said: 'This tunic, which I used in the ministry of Christ, send to him who is dearest to me, a father in age, a brother in office; and whatever affection was due from you to your nephew, transfer to him whom you loved equally with me.' And with such words he died, holding his uncle's hand and me in remembrance.

I know that you would not have wished to prove your fellow citizens' love for you in this way, and would rather have sought your country's affection in prosperity. But this kind of service is more pleasant in good times, more welcome in bad. The whole city mourned him, all Italy mourned him. The earth received his body; his soul was given back to Christ. You sought a nephew, the church a priest. Your successor has gone before you. What you were, he deserved to be after you, in everyone's judgment. And so from one house came a twofold dignity of the episcopate: in the one there is rejoicing that he held it, in the other grief that he was snatched away before he could hold it. It is Plato's saying that the whole life of the wise man is a meditation on death. Philosophers praise this and extol it to the skies; but the apostle says much more forcefully: 'I die daily, by your glory.' It is one thing to attempt, another to do; one thing to live about to die, another to die about to live. The one is about to die from glory; the other always dies into glory. We too, then, ought to prepare our minds for what we shall one day be, and what, willing or not, cannot be far off. For if we exceeded nine hundred years of life, as the human race lived before the flood, and were granted the years of Methuselah, still the past length would be nothing, once it had ceased to be. For between one who lived ten years and one who lived a thousand, once the same end of life and the inescapable necessity of death has come, all that is past is the same, except that the old man sets out burdened with a heavier load of sins. 'The best day of life is the first to flee from wretched mortals; diseases come on, and sad old age, and toil, and the harshness of hard death carries them off.' The poet Naevius says: 'A mortal must suffer many evils.' Hence antiquity feigned that Niobe, because she wept much, was changed into stone, and others into various beasts (as Hecuba into a dog); and Hesiod, lamenting the births of men, rejoices at funerals; and Ennius wisely says: 'In this the common people have the advantage of the king: the people may weep; for a king it is not honorable.' As for a king, so for a bishop, indeed less for a king than for a bishop. For the one rules the unwilling, the other the willing; the one subdues by terror, the other governs by service; the one guards bodies for death, the other preserves souls for life. The eyes of all are fixed on you; your house and way of life, set as on a watchtower, are the teacher of public discipline. Whatever you do, all think they must do. Beware of doing anything that would allow those who wish to find fault to seem to have attacked you justly, or would compel those who wish to imitate you to go wrong. Conquer, as far as you can, or rather even beyond what you can, the softness of your heart, and check your abundantly flowing tears, lest your great love for your nephew be thought by unbelieving minds to be despair toward God. You should long for him as absent, not as dead, so that you may seem to await him, not to have lost him.

But why am I trying to heal a grief that I think has already been calmed by time and reason, and do not rather unfold to you the recent miseries of kings and the calamities of our time, so that he who has lost this light is not so much to be mourned as to be congratulated on having escaped such great evils? Constantius, the patron of the Arian heresy, while preparing against his enemy and hurrying eagerly to battle, died in the village of Mopsus and, to his great grief, left the empire to his foe. Julian, the destroyer of his own soul and the butcher of a Christian army, felt in Media the Christ whom he had first denied in Gaul; and while he wished to extend the Roman frontiers, he lost those already extended. Jovian, having only tasted the goods of kingship, died suffocated by the fumes of charcoal, showing all what human power is. Valentinian, after his native land had been laid waste, leaving his country unavenged, died by vomiting blood. His brother Valens, defeated in the Gothic war in Thrace, had the same place for his death and his tomb. Gratian, betrayed by his own army and not received by the cities in his path, was the sport of his enemy; and your walls, Lyons, bear witness to the traces of the bloody hand. The young Valentinian, almost a boy, after flight, after exile, after recovering the empire at the cost of much blood, was killed not far from the city that knew of his brother's death, and his lifeless corpse was dishonored by hanging. What shall I say of Procopius, Maximus, and Eugenius, who, while they held power, were a terror to the nations? All were captured and stood before the faces of their conquerors, and, what is most wretched for those once most powerful, were pierced by the shame of slavery before they were pierced by the enemy's sword.

Someone may say: such is the lot of kings, 'and the lightnings strike the highest mountains.' I will come to private dignities, and I will not speak of those more than two years back; and, to pass over the rest, it is enough for us to write of the different ends of three former consuls lately. Abundantius is an exile in poverty at Pityus; Rufinus's head was carried on a pike to Constantinople, and his severed right hand begged alms from door to door to the shame of his insatiable greed; Timasius, suddenly hurled from the highest rank of dignity, thinks he has escaped because he lives without glory in the Oasis. I am not narrating the calamities of the wretched but the fragile state of the human condition. My mind shudders to follow the ruins of our time. For twenty years and more Roman blood has been shed daily between Constantinople and the Julian Alps. Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Thessaly, Dardania, Dacia, Epirus, Dalmatia, and all the Pannonias are laid waste, dragged off, plundered by Goths, Sarmatians, Quadi, Alans, Huns, Vandals, and Marcomanni. How many matrons, how many virgins of God, how many freeborn and noble bodies have been the sport of these beasts! Bishops captured, presbyters and clergy of various offices killed, churches overthrown, horses stabled at the altars of Christ, the relics of martyrs dug up: everywhere mourning, everywhere groaning, 'and everywhere the image of death.' The Roman world is falling, and yet our stiff neck does not bend. What spirit do you think the Corinthians, Athenians, Spartans, Arcadians, and all Greece now have, over whom barbarians rule? And I have named only a few cities, in which once there were no small kingdoms. The East seemed free from these evils and only dismayed by the news. But see: last year, let loose upon us from the furthest rocks of the Caucasus, wolves not of Arabia but of the north overran so many provinces in a short time. How many monasteries captured, how many rivers' waters changed with human blood! Antioch besieged, and the other cities that the Halys, Cydnus, Orontes, and Euphrates flow past; flocks of captives dragged away; Arabia, Phoenicia, Palestine, and Egypt captive to fear. 'Not if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths and a voice of iron could I run through all the names of the punishments.' For I have not undertaken to write history, but briefly to weep over our miseries. Otherwise, to explain these things worthily, both Thucydides and Sallust would be dumb.

Happy Nepotian, who does not see these things; happy, who does not hear them! We are wretched, who either suffer or see our brothers suffering such things; and yet we want to live, and think those who are spared these things more to be wept over than called blessed. We have long felt God offended and do not appease him. It is by our sins that the barbarians are strong, by our vices that the Roman army is defeated; and, as if this were not enough for our disasters, civil wars have consumed almost more than the enemy's sword. Wretched were the Israelites, compared with whom Nebuchadnezzar is called the servant of God; unhappy are we, who so displease God that his anger rages against us through the fury of the barbarians. Hezekiah repented, and a hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrians were destroyed by one angel in one night. Jehoshaphat sang the Lord's praises, and the Lord conquered for him who praised. Moses fought against Amalek not with the sword but with prayer. If we wish to be raised up, let us prostrate ourselves. Shame on us, and on a mind stupid to the point of unbelief! The Roman army, conqueror and lord of the world, is defeated by these men, fears them, is terrified at the sight of those who cannot walk and who think themselves dead if they touch the ground; and we do not understand the voices of the prophets, 'A thousand will flee when one pursues,' nor cut off the causes of the disease, so that the disease may be removed with them, and at once we would see arrows yield to javelins, turbans to helmets, nags to horses.

We have gone beyond the measure of consolation, and, while forbidding the weeping of one man's death, we have lamented the dead of the whole world. Xerxes, that most powerful king, who levelled mountains and bridged seas, when from a high place he saw an infinite multitude of men and a countless army, is said to have wept because in a hundred years not one of those he then saw would survive. O, if we could climb such a watchtower, from which we could see the whole earth beneath our feet! Then I would show you the ruins of the whole world, nations dashed against nations and kingdoms against kingdoms; some tortured, some killed, some overwhelmed by the waves, some dragged into slavery; here a wedding, there mourning; these being born, those dying; some abounding in riches, others begging; and not only Xerxes' army but all the people of the whole world now living soon to be no more. Speech is overcome by the greatness of the subject, and all that we say is less.

Let us return, then, to ourselves, and, as if coming down from heaven, look for a little at our own affairs. Do you perceive, I ask you, when you became an infant, when a boy, when a young man, when of mature age, when an old man? We die daily, we change daily, and yet we believe ourselves eternal. This very thing that I dictate, that is written, that I read over, that I correct, is taken from my life. As many strokes as the secretary makes, so many are the losses of my time. We write and write back, letters cross the seas, and as the keel cuts its furrow, with every wave the moments of our life are diminished. Our only gain is that we are joined together by the love of Christ. 'Love is patient, is kind; love is not jealous, does not act wrongly, is not puffed up; it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things; love never fails.' This lives always in the heart; because of it our Nepotian, though absent, is present, and embraces with both hands those separated by such great distances. We have in him a hostage of mutual love. Let us be joined in spirit, bound by affection, and let us imitate, in the case of a son, the fortitude of mind that the blessed Pope Chromatius showed at the falling asleep of his brother. Let our page sing of him, let all our letters sound of him. Him whom we cannot hold in the body, let us hold in memory; and with whom we cannot speak, of him let us never cease to speak.