Letters 69.1–69.10

I never thought, my son Oceanus, that the emperor's pardon would be slandered by the guilty, and that men coming out of prison, after the filth and the marks of chains, would grieve that others had been released. In the gospel the man who envies another's salvation hears: 'Friend, if I am good, why is your eye evil?' 'God has shut up all things under sin, that he may have mercy on all.' 'Where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more.' The firstborn of Egypt were slain, and not even a beast of Israel was left behind in Egypt. And the Cainite heresy rises up against me, and the viper, long dead, lifts its crushed head; and it overthrows, not in part as it used to, but the whole mystery of Christ. For when it says that there are some things which Christ cannot cleanse by his blood, and that the scars of former crimes are burned so deep into bodies and souls that his medicine cannot lessen them, what else does it do but make Christ to have died for nothing? And he did die for nothing if there are some he cannot bring to life. John the Baptist lies, when with finger and voice he points to Christ, saying, 'Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,' if there are still some in the world whose sins Christ has not taken away. For either it must be shown that those whom Christ's pardon passes over are not of the world, or, if they are of the world, one of two alternatives must be chosen: if they are set free from their sins, they prove Christ's power; if they are still guilty, they prove his weakness. But far be it from us to believe that the Almighty is powerless in anything. 'Whatever the Father does, the Son also does likewise.' Weakness in the Son redounds on the Father. All the limbs of the little sheep were carried; all the letters of the apostle sound out the grace of Christ. And lest the simple naming of grace should seem too little, he says, 'Grace to you and peace be multiplied.' Multiplication is promised, and are we to assert scarcity?

What is the point of all this? You know your problem. Carterius, a bishop in Spain, a man old both in years and in priesthood, married one wife before he was baptized and, after the first had died, another after the washing; and you think he has acted against the rule of the apostle, who in his catalogue of virtues laid down that a bishop to be ordained must be the husband of one wife. I am surprised, though, that you have dragged one man into the open, when the whole world is full of such ordinations. I do not speak of presbyters or of the lower orders; I come to bishops, and if I chose to name them one by one, so great a number would be gathered as to exceed the crowd at the synod of Ariminum. But it is unfitting to defend one man in such a way that you seem to accuse many, and to defend by the company of sinners someone you cannot defend by reason. At Rome I had to bear from a most eloquent man a horned syllogism, as it is called, so that whichever way I turned I was held fast. 'Is it a sin,' he said, 'to take a wife, or not?' Simple as I was, and not knowing how to avoid traps, I granted that it was not a sin. Then he put another question: 'In baptism, are good works forgiven, or evil ones?' With the same simplicity I answered that sins are forgiven. When I thought myself safe, the horns began to grow on me from this side and that, and the points, hidden before, began to spread. 'If,' he said, 'taking a wife is not a sin, and baptism forgives sins, whatever is not forgiven is kept in reserve.' At once, as though I had been struck by a mighty boxer, a mist began to swim before my eyes. But I immediately remembered the sophism of Chrysippus, 'If you are lying and say so truly, you are lying,' and coming back to myself I turned the trick of the proposition against my opponent. 'Please answer me,' I said: 'does baptism make a new man, or not?' He barely granted that it made him new. Step by step I went on: 'Does it make him wholly new, or partly?' He answered, 'Wholly.' Next I asked, 'Then nothing of the old man is kept in reserve in baptism?' He nodded. At once I began to weave my argument: 'If baptism makes a new man and creates him wholly new, and nothing of the old man is kept in reserve in him, what once belonged to the old man cannot be charged to the new.' At first our little thorny friend was struck dumb; but afterwards, with the fault of Piso, though he did not know how to speak he could not keep silent. His brow sweated, his cheeks grew pale, his lips trembled, his tongue stuck, his mouth went dry, and he shrank more from fear than from age. At last he burst out: 'Have you not read that the apostle takes the husband of one wife into the priesthood, and that he defines the fact, not the time?' Since he had challenged me with syllogisms, and I saw the man making for crooked little questions, I hurled his own weapons back at him. 'Did the apostle choose baptized men for the episcopate,' I said, 'or catechumens?' He would not answer. But I pressed the same point again and asked a second and a third time. You would have thought him Niobe. I turned to the audience: 'It makes no difference, good judges, whether I bind an opponent awake or asleep, except that it is easier to put chains on one who is still than on one who struggles. If the apostle did not choose catechumens for the clergy but believers, and the one ordained bishop is a believer, the faults of the catechumen will not be charged to the believer.' Such were the darts I was hurling and the quivering spears I aimed at the drowsy man. He only yawned, and as if belching from a hangover of the mind and feeling sick, he spewed out: 'The apostle said it; Paul taught this.'

So the apostle's letters are brought forward, one to Timothy and the other to Titus. In the first it was written: 'If anyone desires the office of bishop, he desires a good work. A bishop, then, must be irreproachable, the husband of one wife, sober, prudent, well ordered, hospitable, a teacher, not given to wine, not violent, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not covetous, one who rules his own house well, having his children in subjection with all chastity (for if a man does not know how to rule his own house, how will he take care of the church of God?), not a new convert, lest being puffed up with pride he fall into the judgement of the devil. He must also have a good testimony from those outside, so that he may not fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.' To Titus these instructions are given at the very beginning: 'For this reason I left you in Crete, that you might set right what was lacking and appoint presbyters in every city, as I directed you: if anyone is without crime, the husband of one wife, having believing children, not accused of riotous living or insubordinate. For a bishop must be without crime, as God's steward, not arrogant, not quick-tempered, not given to wine, not violent, not greedy for shameful gain, but hospitable, kind, prudent, just, holy, self-controlled, holding fast the faithful word that accords with the teaching, so that he may be able to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict it.' In both letters, whether of bishops or of presbyters (though among the ancients bishops and presbyters were the same, since the one name denotes rank and the other age), the command is that men married once be chosen for the clergy. Certainly the apostle is speaking of the baptized; no one doubts it. If, then, all the things that are looked for in the ordination of a bishop do not prejudice the man to be ordained even though he did not have them before baptism (for the question is what he is, not what he was), why should the mere name of a wife be the only hindrance, when it alone was no sin? You say: 'Because it was not a sin, therefore it was not forgiven in baptism.' This is something new I hear: because it was not a sin, it will be counted as a sin! All harlotries, the filth of public debauchery, impiety toward God, parricide and incest toward parents, and nature perverted into unnatural pleasures of either sex are cleansed at the fountain of Christ; and shall the stains of a wife cling, and brothels be preferred to marriage beds? I do not charge you with your armies of prostitutes, your herds of male favourites, the shedding of blood, and your wallowing like a hog in every mire of lust; and do you drag out of her grave against me a poor little wife long dead, whom I married precisely so as not to do what you have done? Let the heathen hear it, the harvest of the church with which our barns are filled every day; let the catechumens hear it, the candidates for the faith: they are not to marry wives before baptism, not to contract honourable marriages, but, after the custom of the Scots and the Atticotti and the Republic of Plato, to have wives in common and children in common. Indeed, let them beware of any name of spouse at all, lest after they have believed in Christ it harm them that they once had, not concubines or harlots, but wives!

Let each man recall his own conscience and mourn the wounds of his whole life; and when he has shown himself a true judge of his former offences, let him hear Jesus rebuking him: 'Hypocrite, first cast the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see to cast the mote out of your brother's eye.' Truly, like the scribes and Pharisees, straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel, we tithe mint and dill and pass over the judgement of God. What is there in common between a wife and a harlot? Is the misfortune of a wife's death to be charged against a man, and a harlot's lust to be crowned? That man, had his first wife lived, would not have had another; but you, who coupled at random in unions like a dog's, what excuse can you give? Perhaps you will say you were afraid that if you contracted a marriage you could never be ordained a cleric? He sought children in a wife; you destroyed offspring in a harlot. He served nature and the blessing of the Lord, 'Increase and multiply and fill the earth,' and the privacy of the bedroom covered him; you in your heat for intercourse were cursed by the public eye. He modestly concealed what was lawful; you shamelessly thrust what was unlawful before the eyes of all. For him it is written, 'Marriage is honourable and the bed undefiled'; for you one reads, 'But God will destroy the sexually immoral and adulterers,' and, 'Whoever destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him.' 'All crimes,' he says, 'were forgiven us in baptism.' And after the judge's pardon there is no severity to be feared, for the apostle says, 'And such some of you were; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.' Well and faithfully were they forgiven. But I ask: how were your filthinesses washed away and my cleanness made filthy? 'I do not say,' you say, 'that it was made filthy, but that it remained in the same state as before; for if it had been filth, it would certainly have been washed away like mine.' Tell me, what is this shuffling, and a point blunter than any pestle? Because it is not a sin, it is a sin; because it is not filthy, it is filthy? The Lord did not forgive, because he had nothing to forgive; and because he did not forgive, does what never existed therefore remain?

How great is the power of baptism and the grace of water sanctified in Christ I shall show a little later. Meanwhile, as the common proverb has it, a bad knot in a tree calls for a bad wedge. The words 'the husband of one wife' can also be explained otherwise. The apostle was of the Jews; the first church of Christ was gathered from the remnant of Israel. He knew that it was allowed by the law, and he knew it was familiar to the people, after the example of the patriarchs and Moses, to beget children by many wives; even the priests themselves were free to use this licence. So he commands that the priests of the church should not claim the same licence for themselves, nor take two or three wives together, but that each should have one wife at a time. You may cry out that what we have said is contentious; then take another explanation too, so that you alone may not be allowed to join the law to your will instead of your will to the law. Some interpret, in a forced way, that 'wives' should be taken as churches and 'husbands' as bishops; and that the fathers at the synod of Nicaea also decreed that a bishop should not be transferred from one church to another, lest, scorning the company of a poor virgin, he seek the embraces of a richer adulteress; and that, just as the fault and vice of the 'children' is taken to mean thoughts (logismoi) and the management of the 'house' is referred to the soul and body, so the 'wives' of the bishops are said to be churches. Of these it is written in Isaiah, 'Women who hasten from the spectacle, come; for this is not a people that has understanding,' and again, 'Rich women, rise up and hear my voice'; and in Proverbs, 'Who will find a valiant woman? She who is such is more precious than costly stones; the heart of her husband trusts in her'; and in the same book, 'Wise women have built a house, but the foolish one has torn it down with her hands.' Nor, they say, should this seem unworthy of bishops, since of God too it is written, 'As a wife despises her husband, so the house of Israel has despised me,' and in the apostle, 'For I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a holy virgin to Christ'; and in all these texts 'woman', that is, gyne, owing to the ambiguity of the Greek word, is better understood as 'wife'. 'This interpretation too,' you say, 'is violent and harsh enough.' Then give Scripture back its simplicity, so that we do not fight against you with your own laws. I will ask something else as well: if a man had a concubine before baptism and, after her death, was baptized and married a wife, ought he to become a cleric or not? You will answer that he can, because he had a concubine, not a wife. So what the apostle condemns is marriage contracts and dowry rights, not intercourse! We see many who, because of great poverty, avoid the burden of wives and keep their slave girls as wives and bring up the children born of them as their own. If perhaps, becoming rich, they obtain the matron's robe for them from the emperor, at once they will have to bow their necks to the apostle and against their will be forced to receive these women among their wives; but if the same poverty cannot obtain the imperial rescript, the decrees of the church will change along with the Roman laws. Consider whether 'the husband of one wife' should not rather be understood as 'of one woman', so that it refers to intercourse rather than to dowry contracts. We bring forward all this, not to resist the true and simple understanding, but to teach you to understand the holy Scriptures as they are written, and not to empty the Saviour's baptism and make void the whole mystery of the cross.

Let us pay what we promised a little earlier, and, borrowing from the school of the rhetoricians, sing the praises of water and of baptism. The unformed world, with no ruddy sun yet, no pale moon, no twinkling stars, was holding down shapeless and invisible matter under the vastness of the deeps and misshapen darkness. The Spirit of God alone was borne over the waters like a charioteer and was bringing the infant world to birth as a figure of baptism. Between heaven and earth the firmament is built in the middle, and according to the etymology of the Hebrew word, heaven, that is shamayim, takes its name from the waters; and the waters that are above the heavens are separated to praise the Lord. So too in Ezekiel crystal is seen spread over the cherubim, that is, waters packed together and made denser. The first living things come forth from the waters, and the winged believers are raised from earth to heaven. Man is fashioned from clay, and the mysteries of the waters are turned in the hands of God. A garden is planted in Eden, and one spring is divided into four heads; and afterwards, coming out of the temple and flowing toward the rising of the sun, it brings to life the bitter and dead waters. The world sins and is not cleansed without a flood of waters. And at once, when the foulest bird has been sent out, the dove of the Holy Spirit flies down to Noah as later to Christ in the Jordan, and with a branch of refreshment and light announces peace to the world. Pharaoh, unwilling to let God's people go out of Egypt, is drowned with his army, in a type of baptism; and in the Psalms it is written of his slaying: 'You made firm the sea by your power; you crushed the heads of the dragons in the waters; you broke the head of the great dragon.' That is why basilisks and scorpions seek out dry places, and when they come near water they make men hydrophobic and frantic. Marah is changed by the mystery of the cross, and the seventy palms of the apostles are watered by the sweetened streams of the law. Abraham and Isaac dig wells, and the Philistines oppose them. Beersheba, the city of the oath, and the kingdom of Solomon take their name from springs. Rebecca is found at a well. Rachel, at the water, is greeted with a kiss by the supplanter. Moses opens a well and defends the daughters of the priest of Midian from wrong. The Lord's forerunner, in the waters of the springs near Salim, which means 'peace' or 'perfection', prepares a people for Christ. The Saviour himself begins to preach the kingdom of heaven after his baptism and after the waters of the Jordan were sanctified by his washing. He works his first sign from water; the Samaritan woman is called to a well; the thirsty are invited to drink. Nicodemus learns in secret that unless one is born again of water and the Holy Spirit he will not enter the kingdom of heaven. As he had begun with water, so he ended with water: his side is pierced with a lance, and the mysteries of baptism and of martyrdom pour out together. After the resurrection he sends the apostles to the Gentiles and commands them to baptize them in the mystery of the Trinity. The Jewish people repent of what they have done, and are at once sent by Peter to baptism. Before she is in labour, Zion gives birth, and a nation is born at once. Paul, the persecutor of the church and the ravening wolf of Benjamin, bows his head to Ananias the sheep, and does not recover his sight until he has healed his blindness by baptism. The eunuch of Queen Candace is prepared for Christ's baptism by reading the prophet; against nature the Ethiopian changes his skin and the leopard his spots. Those who had received John's baptism are baptized again, because they did not know the Holy Spirit, lest anyone of the Gentiles or Jews should think that water without the Holy Spirit can suffice for salvation. 'The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the Lord is upon many waters; the Lord makes the flood a dwelling.' 'Her teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes that have come up from the washing, all bearing twins, and there is none barren among them.' If none is barren or sterile, all have breasts moist with milk, able to say with the apostle, 'My little children, with whom I am again in labour until Christ is formed in you,' and, 'I gave you milk to drink, not solid food.' Micah prophesies of the grace of baptism: 'He will turn again and have mercy on us; he will sink our iniquities and cast all our sins into the depth of the sea.'

How are all sins sunk in the washing, if one wife floats on the surface? 'Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord has not imputed sin.' I think we too may add something to this song: 'Blessed is the man to whom the Lord has not imputed a wife.' Let us hear also Ezekiel, the son of man, declaring the power of him who was to be the Son of Man: 'I will take you from the nations and sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be cleansed from all your uncleannesses; and I will give you a new heart and a new spirit.' 'From all your filth,' he says, 'I will cleanse you.' In 'all', nothing is left out. If filth is cleansed, how much more is cleanness not defiled? 'I will give a new heart and a new spirit'; for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision avails anything nor uncircumcision, but a new nature. So we sing a new song, and having put off the old man we walk not in the oldness of the letter but in the newness of the spirit. This is the new pebble on which a new name is written, which no one can read except the one who has received it. 'For all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death; we were buried with him through baptism into death, so that, as Christ rose from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.' So often we read of newness, and can no newness blot out the stained name of wife? 'We were buried with Christ in baptism and have risen through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. And when we were dead in our trespasses and in the uncircumcision of our flesh, he made us alive together with him, forgiving all our trespasses, blotting out the handwriting of the decree that was against us, which was contrary to us; and he took it out of the way, nailing it to the cross.' All that was ours has died with Christ; all the sins of the old bond are blotted out: does only the name of wife live on? The day would fail me if I tried to set out from the holy Scriptures everything that bears on the power of baptism, and to expound the mysteries of the second birth, or rather, the first birth in Christ.

Before I finish dictating (for I see that I am already exceeding the measure of a letter), I wish to explain briefly the preceding clauses, in which the life of a future bishop is described, so that we may accept the apostle as teacher of the Gentiles not only in the praise of the one wife but in all that he commands. At the same time I beg that no one think I have written what I have written to mock the priests of our time, but for the benefit of the church. For just as orators and philosophers, when they describe what they would have the perfect orator or philosopher be, do no injury to Demosthenes or Plato but define the things themselves apart from persons, so in the description of a bishop and in the explanation of what is written, a kind of mirror of the priesthood is held up. It is now in the power and conscience of each to see what he looks like in it, so that he may either grieve at his ugliness or rejoice at his beauty. 'If anyone desires the office of bishop, he desires a good work': a work, not a dignity; labour, not luxury; a work through which he may grow smaller in humility, not swell with high position. 'A bishop, then, must be irreproachable.' The very thing he says to Titus, 'if anyone is without crime', embraces all the virtues in one word and demands almost something beyond nature. For if every sin, even in an idle word, deserves reproach, who is there who lives in the world without sin, that is, without reproach? But the future shepherd of the church is chosen to be such that in comparison with him the others are rightly called the flock. Rhetoricians define the orator as 'a good man, skilled in speaking'. First the life, then the tongue must be irreproachable, so that he may rightly be accepted; for a man whose speech is destroyed by his deeds loses the authority to teach. 'The husband of one wife': of this we have spoken above. Now we only warn that if 'the husband of one wife' is required even before baptism, we should require the other commands before baptism as well; for it does not fit to understand all the rest as after baptism and this one command alone as before baptism. 'Sober' or 'vigilant' (for the word means both), 'prudent, well ordered, hospitable, a teacher': the priests who minister in the temple of God are forbidden to drink wine and strong drink, lest their hearts be weighed down with surfeiting and drunkenness, and so that their mind, performing its service to God, may always be vigorous and clear. When he adds 'prudent', he excludes those who excuse the folly of priests under the name of simplicity; for unless the brain is sound, all the limbs will be at fault. 'Well ordered' too is an explanation of the previous word, that is, 'irreproachable'. One who has no vices is called irreproachable; one who excels in virtues is well ordered. We can also understand something else from this word, according to Tully's saying: 'The chief thing in an art is that what you do should be seemly.' For some people, ignorant of their own measure and so dull and senseless that in movement, gait, dress, and ordinary speech they give onlookers something to laugh at, dress themselves up as if they understood what being well ordered is, with clothes and bodily finery, and prepare the dishes of a rather sumptuous table, when all such finery and adornment is fouler than filth. That teaching is required of priests is laid down in the precepts of the old law and written more fully to Titus. For a blameless manner of life without speech does as much harm by silence as it does good by example; the fury of wolves must be driven off by the barking of dogs and the shepherd's staff. 'Not given to wine, not violent': he set vices against virtues.

We have learned what priests ought to be; let us learn what they ought not to be. Drunkenness belongs to buffoons and revellers, and a belly boiling with wine soon foams over into lusts. In wine is riot, in riot pleasure, in pleasure unchastity. She who lives in riot is dead while she lives; so he who gets drunk is both dead and buried. Noah, for one hour's drunkenness, bares his thighs, which he had covered by sobriety for six hundred years. Lot, in drunkenness, unknowingly mingles incest with lust, and the man whom Sodom had not conquered was conquered by wine. A violent bishop is condemned by him who gave his back to the scourges and, when reviled, did not revile in return. 'But gentle': against two evils he set one good, so that drunkenness and anger might be curbed by gentleness. 'Not quarrelsome, not covetous': for nothing is more headstrong than the arrogance of the uneducated, who think talkativeness is authority and, always ready for disputes, thunder at the flock subject to them with swollen words. That avarice is to be shunned in a priest Samuel teaches, when he proves before the people that he has taken nothing from anyone; and so does the poverty of the apostles, who received relief for their expenses from the brothers and boasted that they had nothing and wanted nothing beyond food and clothing. What he calls avarice when writing to Timothy he most plainly marks as greed for shameful gain when writing to Titus. 'Ruling his own house well': not so as to increase his wealth, not to prepare royal banquets, not to heap up engraved dishes and cook pheasants in gentle steam so that the heat reaches the bones without, by a skilful balance, dissolving the surface of the flesh; but so that he may first require from his household what he is going to preach to the people. 'Having his children in subjection with all chastity': that is, lest they imitate the sons of Eli, who slept with women at the entrance of the temple and, thinking religion a booty, turned whatever was best in the victims to their own pleasure. 'Not a new convert, lest being puffed up with pride he fall into the judgement of the devil': I cannot wonder enough at how great men's blindness is, that they argue about wives before baptism, and bring slander upon a thing that died in baptism, or rather was made alive with Christ, when no one keeps so plain and evident a command as this. Yesterday a catechumen, today a bishop; yesterday in the amphitheatre, today in the church; in the evening at the circus, in the morning at the altar; lately a patron of actors, now a consecrator of virgins. Was the apostle ignorant of our shufflings, and did he not know our silly arguments? He who said 'the husband of one wife' also commanded 'irreproachable, sober, prudent, well ordered, hospitable, a teacher, gentle, not given to wine, not violent, not quarrelsome, not covetous, not a new convert'. We shut our eyes to all of these and see only the wives. As for his saying, 'lest being puffed up with pride he fall into the judgement of the devil', who does not prove it true by example? The priest made in a moment does not know the humility and meekness of simple people, does not know Christian gentleness, does not know how to despise himself. He is moved from dignity to dignity; he has not fasted, has not wept, has not often reproved his own conduct and corrected it by constant meditation, has not given his substance to the poor. From chair to chair, as the saying is, that is, from pride to pride. And no one doubts that the judgement and fall of the devil is arrogance. Into it fall those who in a moment of time, not yet disciples, are already masters. 'He must also have a good testimony from those outside': as the beginning, so the close. One who is irreproachable is praised with one voice, not only by his own household but by strangers too. The strangers, those outside the church, are Jews, heretics, and Gentiles. Let Christ's bishop be such that those who disparage religion dare not disparage his life. But now we see many either buying the people's favour with money, like charioteers, or living so hated by everyone that they cannot extort with money what mimes obtain by gestures.

These are the things, my son Oceanus, which the church's teachers ought to investigate with anxious fear, and still more to keep themselves; they ought to observe the canons in choosing priests, and not interpret the law of Christ by their own hatreds and private feuds and by envy, which always gnaws its own author. See how strong a testimony there is for this twice-married man whom they accuse: apart from the marriage bond, and that before baptism, his rivals can bring nothing else against him. He who commanded, 'You shall not commit adultery,' also said, 'You shall not kill.' If we do not commit adultery but do kill, we are transgressors of the law. 'Whoever keeps the whole law and offends in one point has become guilty of all.' So when they bring against us a wife before baptism, let us require of them everything commanded after baptism. They pass over what is not lawful and object to what is allowed.