Sermons of Maximus of Turin (Bruni's collection) 14.1–19.1

It has often been pressed upon your ears, both from the divine Scriptures and from our preaching, that the first fault of sinning in Adam was the enticement of the mind, and that the cause of the transgression was the craving for food. For while among so many precious delicacies of paradise he would not keep the fast of abstaining from one, he lost the enjoyment of all delights, and forfeited what was allowed while he craved what was forbidden. Had he endured abstinence from one food, he would certainly not have been left fasting from so many good things. Therefore, brothers, recognizing in our forefather the cause of the offence, let us cut off from ourselves the occasion of stumbling. And the craving that he stretched beyond the line of the command, let us keep within the boundary of the precept, and let us not, because of fasts commanded for a very short time, allow ourselves to lose the sweetness of our whole life. If he sinned by tasting, why should I not please by fasting? If food was death to him, why should not abstinence profit me for salvation? He is plainly foolish who is neither instructed by precepts nor taught by examples. See, then, whether such a precept is not given to us when we are reborn as was laid on Adam when he was created. For it is said to us, as to those set in a paradise of delights and resting in pleasantness by the springs of the Lord, that we may take food from the fruits of all the virtues, but may not taste of the one little tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Who would not be content with such a law—to abstain from one thing so as to have delight in very many? We are commanded, I say, to abstain from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; we ought to understand what that tree is. For if the saints are fattened on the fruits of the disciplines, what is the tree forbidden to the righteous man but worldly indiscipline? Whoever after receiving grace tastes worldly wantonness receives the discernment of good and evil. For he begins to know both what holiness he has lost and what perdition he has fallen into. Not that the taste of the tree gives a man that knowledge, but that the conscience was innocent; after it has been polluted, it both weeps for the good things lost and groans over the evils committed. An unstained life, however, is not held by such knowledge; for, being always holy or simple, it thinks that only what is pure exists in man. But wantonness makes a man wickedly expert in very much through the experience of sins. It is good, then, for a Christian to have a holy rusticity rather than a criminal knowledge. The tree in which good and evil are to be known—I do not want such expertise. For what profit is it to know what it does not profit to know, what one would repent of knowing? For the Lord has laid down for man in the tabernacle of the Church the same kind of law as he commanded in the possession of paradise. For the Church is a paradise sheltered by the pleasantness of various virtues, or trees, from whose bosom Christ goes forth as a most shining spring, and, after the likeness of paradise, the streams are drawn off as into the rivers of the four evangelists. For the blessed apostles and evangelists are to be compared with rivers, because by the spirit of their teaching the face of the whole people is watered. There is no Christian soul that does not draw from the holy spring of the evangelists. Plainly the Gospel is like a river, of which holy David also says: “The rush of the river gladdens the city of God.” For the city of Christ is gladdened when in it a purified people is carried in by the course of Gospel teaching, and by a certain rush of preaching its court is filled with the commerce of holiness. The rush of the Gospel word, I say, gladdens the city of God; it carries some things into it, and purifies others. It brings in the pearls of righteousness; it washes away the filth of wickedness. Therefore, brothers, set as it were in the paradise of the Church, we have received the commandment to keep the law of fasting. And let us not violate the consecrated number of forty days even by a slight taste, because the Lord is not harmed by our being full but is offended by the transgression of the law. Indeed, Adam, as soon as he tasted against the prohibition, fell from the grace of immortality.

Your love should remember that I preached last Sunday and gave the reason why the Lord fasted forty days, and why he spent those fasts in the desert. For we said that he observed all this not for his own justification, who was a virgin in all things, but for our salvation, so that those whose race had sinned through intemperance might be healed through abstinence. Let us see, then, what was done at that time and in that solitude. For the evangelist says that the devil was there and the Saviour was tempted by his cunning. For the sacred reading says that the Lord was hungry, and the devil said to him: “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” See the Lord's art, by which he outwits the adversary's art. After long fasts he pretends to be hungry, so that by being hungry he may provoke again the devil whom he had already conquered by fasting. For he in a manner gives him hope of engaging him because of the weakness of hunger, so that while the devil engages him as a weakling he may be the more gloriously overcome. For this is true victory: that since the devil had overthrown Adam immortal, glorious, and feasting, he should now be conquered by a man mortal, lowly, and hungry. For the devil, seeing the Lord hungry, thinks him a man, doubts that he is the Saviour, and so says: “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” O wretched and desperate encounter of Satan! The devil in the desert of temptation finds no solid weapons; he lacks the pleasant trees of paradise, he lacks Eve his counsellor, he lacks the attractive deceit of fruits; and because he finds no food to offer the hungry one, he asks for stones to be changed into food. Shut out on every side, cheated on every side, he turns to the very ground. He shows plainly enough that the barrenness of the desert has resisted him, when he thinks that for lack of things even the elements can be changed. He asks, then, for stones to be changed into bread. Cunning and crafty, he knows what he asks; he knows that what he says has been done. For he remembers that in the Old Testament water flowed from a rock for the thirsty; here too he wants to supply food from a stone for the hungry. He remembers also the hardness of the rock dissolved into flowing springs; here too he desires the roughness of stone to be transformed into the sweetness of bread. For he suspected that it was Christ who is accustomed to do such things with the nature of rocks, as the apostle Paul says: “They drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.” He suspected, I say, that he was the Christ, when he asked him to make bread from a stone; but he thought him only a man when he saw him hungry. The Saviour, however, condemns his cunning with a wonderful answer. He does not do what the devil says, so as not to seem to display the glory of his power at the adversary's bidding. Yet he did not answer that it could not be done, since he could not deny what he had often already done. So he neither yields to the one who asks nor refuses the one who probes; and by this he both keeps the power of his might at his own discretion and refutes the cunning of the adversary by divine speech. He answered him, then: “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of God”; that is, not by earthly bread, not by material food, by which you deceived Adam, the first man, but by the word of God, in which is the nourishment of heavenly life. The Word of God is Christ the Lord, as the evangelist says: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” Whoever, then, is fed on the word of Christ does not look for earthly fodder. For he cannot long for the bread of the world who is refreshed by the bread of the Saviour. For the Lord has his own bread—indeed the Saviour himself is bread, as he taught, saying: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” Of this bread the prophet says: “And bread strengthens the heart of man.” What use to me, then, is the bread the devil offers, when I have the bread that Christ imparts? What use to me is the food by which I remember the first-formed man was cast down? I have seen Esau cheated of his birthright, Judas Iscariot branded with the crime of betrayal. For Adam lost paradise through food, Esau lost the honour of the firstborn through a lentil, Judas laid aside the high office of the apostolate through a morsel; for from the moment he took the morsel he began to be no longer an apostle but a traitor. For you have it written, as the Lord says: “The one to whom I give the dipped bread will betray me. And immediately after the morsel Satan entered into him.” Not good is the food after which the Lord is denied, after which the enemy enters; not good the food after which Christ is spat out and Antichrist devoured. Not good the food that lacks blessing and is filled with cursing. We need, then, that food which gives life, which feeds the soul, after which Christ follows and the enemy is shut out. We ought to receive that food which the Saviour, not the devil, follows; which by its reception makes a confessor, not a traitor. How well, in the time of fasting, he said that it is the word of God that refreshes, to show that our fasts ought not to be taken up with worldly business but exercised in the sacred Scriptures! For he neglects the body's hunger who attends to the fodder of reading; nor can he care for his belly who gains the nourishment of the heavenly word. That is the refreshment that fattens the soul, that enriches the inner parts, when from the divine Scriptures we gain the food of everlasting speech. That is the food that gives eternal life and shuts out from us the snares of the devil's temptation. And that the reading of the sacred Scriptures is life the Lord testifies, saying: “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”

We ought not to be so very saddened, brothers, that in these days of Lent the trial of tribulation has come upon us, since we see that our Saviour too was tempted because of Lent itself. We little servants, then, ought to grieve less, since we have the Lord's example. For where there is a devotion like Christ's, there is also a temptation like Christ's. The condition of fasting imposes on us the condition of enduring. But we believe that, as our Saviour overcame the devil when he was tempted, so we too can conquer our enemies when we are afflicted. For Christ's fasts can be tempted; they cannot be overcome. They have hardships in their observance, but they bestow prosperity and safety. Let us see, then, among the other temptations, by what art the Lord wearies him. For when the Saviour stood on the pinnacle of the temple, the devil said: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down,” and so on. Truly the craft of the devil's fraud relies on its customary argument. For he always tries to throw the religious down from higher things to lower, and hastens to draw them away from holy and venerable acts to earthly and muddy ones, so that one who stands by purity of mind on the summit of the temple may throw himself into the depth of hell by the contagion of sin. For when he strives to throw the Lord down from the pinnacle of the temple, he is certainly trying to remove him from the perfect worship of religion; for the pinnacle of the holy place is the perfection of the heavenly sacrament. Rightly is the Lord said to stand on the pinnacle (pinna) of the temple, because of him it is written: “Who walks on the wings (pennas) of the winds.” For the Lord in a manner walks on the wings of the winds when he moves in flight upon the eager conduct of our morals; for good morals are our wings, which lift us up from the lowly things of earth to the heights of heaven, and by a kind of flight of the mind lead us out of dark Tartarus and bring us to the pleasant places of paradise. Desiring to have the wings of these morals, the prophet says: “Who will give me wings like a dove, and I will fly and be at rest?” On this pinnacle of the temple, then, the Saviour is said to stand; that is, to dwell as it were in a kind of temple of our faith. That is why the Apostle says: “You are the temple of the living God, and the Spirit of God dwells in you.” Standing, then, in this temple, and not withdrawing, the Lord rebukes the devil, saying: “It is written, You shall not tempt the Lord your God”; that is, you shall not tempt him whom you think, as a man, can be pushed down to lower things, but rather know that he is to be adored as God and Lord. In these days of fasting, then, we are tempted after the likeness of the Saviour; likewise our enemies try to throw us into confusion from the pinnacle of the temple, that is, from the observance of Lent. For while they bring terrors, while they prepare snares, they desire to draw us away from the citadel of religion. But it is said to them by the Lord: You shall not tempt holy men and servants of God; for those you think can be trampled as lowly you will find must be honoured as valiant. For there are, as I said, many brothers whom our enemies draw away from the perfection of religion, who, while they fear the present evil, think God unmindful of our salvation, not knowing that God is unmindful of no one; but we make him unmindful of us when we sin. For when we do evil he turns away his face; when we speak abominations he stops his ear; and so God does not so much withdraw his goodness himself as our offences drive him back. For the same Lord says through the prophet to those who were placed in tribulations: “Is my hand not strong enough to rescue you?” and so on. You see, then, that sins separate God and man. Take sins out of the way, then, and you have made God near to you. For how, brothers, can God forget us, who says in the Gospel that even the hairs of our head are numbered with him? If he remembers our hairs, much more does he remember our souls. For by the numbering we recognize his care and concern for us; for no one numbers anything but what he wishes to guard more carefully; no one numbers but one who fears he may suffer loss without numbering. A shepherd counts his flock often to keep it safe; indeed the Lord, who is the good shepherd, when one little sheep out of a hundred had strayed, going back to the count, carried it back to the flock on his own shoulders. He who is held in the number is so far kept under protection that, when he strays, he is carried back on the shepherd's own shoulders, lest anything be lacking from the number. Do not think, then, brothers, that he forgets even the least. For God remembers all, recalls all, provided only that forgetfulness is not brought upon him by our sins coming between.

Your holiness remembers that some days ago we explained that through this observance of holy Lent a kind of restoration of the human race is carried out, so that through this most sacred season the frailty of our condition [is restored], since the grace of immortality which Adam lost by sinning Christ restores by pardoning, and what he who sinned by eating against the prohibition [lost], this one justifies by fasting according to the precept. For this is the whole purpose of Christianity and of faith: that what had perished may be saved, what had strayed may be called back, what had already died may be reborn. For the offence of the first generation certainly became the occasion of the second birth, and from the transgression of that one arose the grace of this justification. For there would have been no need for man to be born again if what he had been had not perished. But someone says: God could have pardoned man the sins contracted through Adam in such a way that it was not necessary for him to be born again. Listen, then, and understand the reason. God, as we know, is truthful and just and can never lie. When, then, he had formed Adam and had laid down for him in paradise a law of this kind, that he should not taste at all of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that on the day he tasted it he would surely die, then man, though bound by such a command, passed over the command, ran into the law, and by his transgression brought on himself the death that God had foretold. Therefore, as we said, because it is impossible for the decrees of the Godhead to be overturned, and man had run into the snare of the law, it was not fitting for him to be pardoned without a second birth, because the order of the precepts could not be undone; but he willed man to be reborn and in a manner to become another; and because the sentence of the law could not be changed, the person bound over to the law would be changed; that is, in one and the same man the condition would bind the one, grace would free the other; the old would satisfy severity, the new would grow into goodness; so that the precept would keep its force in man, and another enrolment would rescue the man. For whoever is reborn has fulfilled the condition of the first generation and takes up the origin of the second birth; whoever, I say, is reborn has ceased to be what he was and begins to be what he was not; he has died to the old things and has been renewed already for the things to come. How good, then, is our Lord! He so laid down the law as not to neglect mercy; he so has mercy as not to violate the decrees of the law. As a just one he carried out the sentence; as a merciful one he granted pardon. For that we die is decreed by the former sentence; that we rise again is the gift of the later bounty. Therefore, brothers—I am speaking to you catechumens—hasten to the grace of the second birth, so that Adam may end in you and Christ begin; that death may be made void and life succeed; that the sentence of severity may be abolished and the grace of renewal follow. For the severity of the judge is abolished when, renewal intervening, the sentence does not recognize its own. But unless our old man has been changed, and the penalty of the precept pursues the new person, he will not be able to escape the condition of death who has not fled for refuge to the author of that condition. For Christ the Lord says: “Unless you believe that I am he, you will die in your sins.” So let us believe in Christ, and so let us faithfully put on grace, that what he says is true: “Unless one is born again of water,” and so on. Let us, then, put on the Lord, both by grace and by his precepts; for death will not hold those in whom it sees not Adam but that they are with Christ, who is life. Above all, let us keep his precepts, and especially those about the fasts of Lent. For there are many who, when this most sacred number of fasting is proclaimed, violate the divinely appointed time by eating on the weeks between, not understanding that by tasting against the prohibition they are guilty of no less a transgression than that Adam who ate against the prohibition. But the passion of Christ redeemed his transgressions; who will redeem these, who are transgressors after the Lord's passion?

We ought to think of the whole time of our life as a kind of racecourse of virtues, and to strive with our whole mind toward the heavenly prize. But this must be done especially in the days of Lent, which, dedicated to abstinence and fasting, confer on us as much toward virtue of soul as they drive out pleasure from the body. That number of fasting is a lawful one, and one celebrated in the examples of the saints. Moses, when he was to receive the law from God, spent forty days and nights without food or drink, and was prepared by fasting to receive the Lord's will. Elijah, after a fast of forty days, was carried from this world in a fiery chariot to the heights of heaven. Our Lord and Saviour himself also, fasting forty days, triumphed over the devil's temptations, so as to come to the preaching of the Gospel already a victor. Rightly, then, we too ought to keep with fasting this number of days, which we read was consecrated by such examples. Let us, then, celebrate these days with all eagerness of mind and joy, and prefer them to all feasts and bodily delights. For in these days especially let us be kindled to fulfil the Lord's will, when the pleasure of the flesh is most of all extinguished by abstinence. For then the mind hastens more purely to the Lord and to his future promises, when it is made gross by no drunkenness, no fullness of food and drink. That is why the Saviour said in the Gospel: “Take heed to yourselves, then, lest your bodies be weighed down with drunkenness and intoxication and worldly thoughts, and that day come upon you suddenly; for like a snare it will come upon the whole world, and no one will escape.” There is also this great benefit in the days of Lent: that while we abstain even from things permitted, we are reminded more and more to avoid things forbidden. For we who abstain from meat, which it is permitted to use on other days; we who abstain from wine, which it is permitted to use in moderation; we, then, who avoid these things that are sometimes permitted, let us above all flee sins, which are never permitted at all. So if we wish to fast from food, let us above all fast from vices. For what profit is it to be pale with fasting if you are livid with hatred and envy? What profit is it not to drink wine and to be drunk with the poison of anger? What profit is it to abstain from meat, created to be eaten, and to tear the limbs of our brothers with malicious slander? What profit is it if we abstain from things that are sometimes permitted and do those that are never permitted? For God honours and loves those who flee what is forbidden. Let us, then, as I said, so fast from food that much more we fast from vices, so that we may be filled with the abundance of holy morals, and may deserve in the future to be satisfied with the reward of those very works, as we read in the Gospel: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.” For we ought rather to choose this compensation: that the food from which we abstain we give to the poor and the sick, according to what is written: “Blessed are those who are content to go hungry so that others may be refreshed.” A gift is quite acceptable to God when the needy is filled, when the naked is clothed, when anger is not carried out and no time is kept for wrath, when evil is not repaid with evil. Then our fasts are pleasing to God, if those who fast from necessity are refreshed by us. For then we shall deserve to hear that saying of the Lord: “Truly I tell you, as long as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.” O most kind Lord, to tame the avarice of men, who says that what is given to even the least poor man is given to him! May the mercy of the Lord grant you, brothers, to serve him with fasts and alms and good works, so that he may lead you to true and eternal life, he who lives and reigns for ages of ages. Amen.

If your love remembers well, dearest brothers, last Sunday we preached that the Lord himself consecrated holy Lent by abstaining, and, taking no food at all through the course of so many days and nights, made one solid body of fasting, which it is sacrilege not to keep in full and sin to violate in part. He did this for the sake of our salvation, so as to teach a useful thing not only by words but to instruct us by examples too; so that by the same steps by which we run to faith we might walk to abstinence. But let us see what reason the Saviour had for proclaiming fasts and, as a good physician of the human race, fasting first himself. For a good physician tastes first the cup he is about to give the sick man, so as to show the skill of his art in himself first, and so that the sick man, receiving the proof, may be confident about the cup and more confident about his recovery. Then [let us see] in what place he spent this very time of fasting. For the evangelist says that the Lord abstained forty days and nights in the desert. I think, then, this is the reason for the fast: that, because the first Adam, placed in paradise, had lost the glory of immortality through the intemperance of his gullet, Christ the second Adam might restore that same immortality through abstinence. And because Adam, tasting of the forbidden tree against God's command, had fallen into the sin of death, now Christ, fasting according to the Lord's command, might merit the righteousness of life. For the Saviour did this so that offences might be cleansed by the same steps by which they had been committed; that is, because man had transgressed by eating, he might correct it by abstaining; or because by feasting he had known woman, now by fasting he might despise her. For Adam knew Eve only when intemperance had brought it about. As long as unstained frugality remained in them, unpolluted virginity also remained; and as long as they fasted from the forbidden food, so long they also fasted from shameful sins. For hunger is the friend of virginity and the enemy of wantonness, while fullness squanders chastity and nourishes allurement. So, as I said, the Lord does this so that man might be freed by the same precedents by which he had been made liable to sin. For this reason, in all things according to the likeness of Adam, he would undo all the sins of men. For Adam was born of virgin earth, and Christ was brought forth from the Virgin Mary. Adam's maternal soil had not yet been split by hoes; Christ's maternal secret place was never violated by desire. Adam is formed from clay by the hands of God; Christ is formed in the womb by the Spirit of God. Both, then, arise from God the Father; both are born of a virgin mother; both, as the evangelist says, are sons of God; but Adam is God's creature, Christ his substance. The Lord, then, does this as the second Adam: that what the former man had lost by eating, the other might recover by fasting, and might keep in the desert the law of abstinence given in paradise. For he knew that God's precept is a law not of one place but of the world. For it makes no difference to the command of the Godhead whether you keep it at home or in the field, since he who commanded is everywhere. In the desert, then, the Saviour fulfils God's command, so as to save for himself the wandering Adam there where he had been cast out from the possession of paradise. For Adam, driven out of paradise, endured the deserts of an untilled world. In the desert, then, salvation is first poured back on man, where there are no feasts, where delights are lacking, where—what is the cause of all evils—woman too is lacking. For Adam could have stood unshaken among those delights of paradise had Eve not been there with the devil's allurements. The desert, then, is suited to salvation, where there is no Eve to persuade, no woman to flatter. See a wonderful thing: in paradise the devil contends with Adam; in the desert the devil fights with Christ; everywhere he lies in wait for man, everywhere he engages him. But where he finds a woman he conquers; where he does not find a woman, he goes away conquered. God, then, gave us a pattern in this deed: that in the time of fasting, as though dwelling in the desert, we should abstain from feasts, from pleasure, from woman, so that Eve may not be joined to us, and may not overturn us from chaste observance by enticing persuasion. For he seems in a manner to dwell in the desert who in the time of Lent is fasting and chaste. The very body of a Christian is plainly a kind of desert when it is not filled with food, not watered with drink, but neglected in the squalor of parching hunger. Our body, I say, is a desert when its heat withers with abstinence, pallor spreads over it from thirst, and the whole person's appearance, uncared for, grows shabby through contempt of things. Then Christ the Lord dwells in the desert of our breast, when he finds our earth squalid and dry with thirst, as the prophet David says: “As in a land desert, pathless, and waterless, so in the sanctuary I have appeared to you.” For we cannot otherwise appear to him as in the sanctuary unless the land of our body is desert of worldly delights, pathless to devilish desires, and waterless to lustful allurements. Then the Saviour, dwelling in this desert of our body, overcomes there all the factions of the devil, and makes his dwelling secluded and secure from the thoughts of the world, so that from then on, set within ourselves as in a solitude, we may look only to heaven and earth; that is, we may think of no other than the Lord of the heavenly kingdom and the author of the resurrection of the earth.