Commonitorium (Instruction) 1.541–2.391

and in swift course, after you have lost it, you will grieve, as they grieved who held it before you. Do you build immense citadels as though they would never fall, you who will yourself swiftly die? Bright with thin glass, a smooth chamber of varied marbles is adorned for your sleep: as though restful quiet did not come, under roofs joined of wood, to a breast that is truly secure. Surely water offered by cupped palms washes thirsty lips no otherwise than water offered by a hollow gem; and the fasting of a ravenous belly will take in just the same the food that crystal gives and that a plain dish gives. Does not the shaggy sheep offer you cloaks better for driving off the cold of icy winter than the garment which, with metal drawn out into smooth threads, loaded down, breaks your every step? What use to you is a transparent dress, which with its thin covering offers to strangers' eyes the limbs that should be covered? Silver and masses of gold and gleaming gems are from the world and of the world: from here they come, here they stay. You came into life naked, and naked you will return: you had brought nothing with you, you will be able to carry nothing away. Yet you will be able to carry away the world's gifts if you despise them here: send ahead the wealth you will follow, that it may be doubled. For goods kept too closely will soon not be yours; if you do not keep them for yourself, then they will be yours. Gifts which a dying man gives are not gifts: for he gives what is already ceasing to be his. He who, healthy and fearing nothing, with a quiet mind, took from himself while he lived, he is the one who gave.

and what he took from himself will be restored to him better: he who gives perishing things will soon receive them whole. For what is laid up in heaven no thief, no enemy will carry off, no moth or rains or devouring flame will consume; and you will lay up in heaven whatever, for the name of Christ, looking to Christ, you give to the poor. He says, after the mysteries of the flesh he took on: “I am clothed in the naked, I am relieved in the wretched, I am visited in the imprisoned, I am cared for and comforted in the sick, I am helped in the little ones, protected in the widows, and whatever you do or do not do to the wretched, believe that it is done to me, or not done to me.” And lest, being poor, you plead poverty, to give a colour to unjust avarice, if you have not the means which the needy man seeks, not food, nor warm water to refresh him, when the thirsty man asks, a cup of cold water offered in the name of Christ will be able to bring rewards. In this way, as each of you can, comfort the wretched man who asks, and if gifts are lacking, you will give prayers. For before God the will itself will not perish which, if it cannot do good, at least desires good. Hence it was that the Lord with happy admonitions wished all men to be joined by the love of peace, and what he had praised before through the holy prophets he handed down to his disciples with his own mouth, so that nothing unjust, nothing harsh, nothing violent, nothing light, nothing greedy, nothing grievous, nothing fickle, could the love of peace, kept in a chaste heart, either do in deeds or say in words.

Hence the concord of peace holds the whole world together, which is given even to the brutes, as well as to those with reason. And though cold things fight with fiery, soft with hard, moist with dry, slow with swift, it unites every work, by silent governance through unknown causes, in one covenant of peace. So, if you would compare great things with small, the love of peace bridles the people of the body, so that, united under an earthly prince, it may learn to pay its vows together to the King of heaven. Therefore, sinner like me, though far less than I, for I surpass all men in my crimes, love peace when appeased, love peace also when wronged: let peace be in your heart, let peace be in your mouth. Drive out hatred, despise threats, lay aside swelling pride, let no length of time keep your offence alive, so that the sun, as it departs, may leave you keeping the bonds of gentle peace and, as it returns, may find you so.

If you walk by my admonitions, most faithful reader, you tread securely on the dark-blue neck of the serpent. And when Christ the judge is present, you will soon go to meet him, carried through the soft air by gentle winds. Only see that at no time any part of these commands escapes your care. Or if the glory of a windy tongue should move you, which Tullius urges with vain eloquence, but if jest, banquets, talk and pleasure are to be fled, so that you must even be parted from those of your own age, with what zeal will you keep the words of our little book, so as to be joined to God by the merits of your life? The chief labour is to despise flattering praise, which, ambitious, draws men headlong, and always hastens to the inmost parts with silent motion and sits, a bitter plague, in the very vitals. While we want whatever we do to be approved, and no one fails to favour his own vices, the miser with a softened title calls himself thrifty, cruelty is veiled under the name of keenness, and with all our zeal and all our art we strive that whatever we say or do may please. But you, if you wish to be approved by Christ alone, let no glory be sought for you from man. For when brought low, you will soon be exalted, and you will be small for the Lord's sake, great with the Lord. Whatever injury vexes you, be content; to no one, if you have suffered evil, return a like evil. See, Christ prays to the Father for those who tore him, and Stephen prays, and James prays,

while with gentle and great mind, though they suffered the uttermost, they wish to be the cause of punishment to no one. Let no cruel sentence of yours make anyone guilty; do not hasten to punish anyone with austere judgment. You see the slender splinter in your brother's eye, and do not know that there is a beam in your own eyes. Unjustly will he desire to describe the life of another who cannot be the champion of his own. But we, condemned for our vices, persist in them, and what we ourselves rebuke we soon do as well. Believe that deceiving is a sin! The saying stands that says: “The mouth that lies kills the soul with death.” And remember always to have said what will be true, and let your speech not sound out what is not. Besides, put reins on your sweet palate, lest taste rage with its old allurements. Those who possessed the gifts and kingdom of heaven ambitious gluttony made mortal, while we rush more into what is forbidden, and desire what is denied, and what is difficult, this we rather want. Above all, refuse to soak your veins with abundant wine, lest wines suddenly become poisons. As, whenever the dry earth thirsts in too great heat, the earth the skilful farmer prepares for crops, if, before the sun has killed the weeds pulled up, thick clouds water the moist days, at once it will bear thorns and grasses harmful to the harvest, alas, wrongly fertile, the seeds overcome: so bodies that have been given to much wine are lost to good counsel and run riot with vices.

And what will ever be more sordid, what more unsightly, than if drunkenness takes you away from yourself? When the head sways this way and that, and the step totters, the mind refuses sense, the tongue refuses to hold its sound, the drooping eyes close in heavy sleep, you do not know what you are doing, even while you do it. Why should I speak of the heat brought to the steaming face, and words let loose in ill-ordered measures, cups slipping from the hands, and, over the very tables, food mixed with wine often coming back up, and you, through countless motions, as the wounded mind wishes, now rejoicing too much, now weeping too much, and now whirling your swaying limbs in dance, now lifting your arms in wanton choruses? I would cry out: buried in wine and feasts, perhaps even forgetful of your own name, when will devout care to pray to God, who so generously gives you such things, then steal into your mind? How many of the needy could be fed at such great expense, how many glad days would this one day give? But now, while you are full, the hungry poor man wanders round you: you vomit wine, the other scarcely has water. And if perhaps a needy voice asks for food, you will refuse to those who have nothing this which you have to spare. I sense that you have long been saying silently, reader: “True indeed, but what you lay down is hard.” Hard things we are commanded; to climb from earth to heaven, do not think that this stands at little labour. For great is the labour; but great is the reward of the labour. Let him who hopes for rewards flee sloth.

No one will carry off the palm unless he has first contended. The pleasant crown is given only to the victor. Or if the frail honours of the world are sought by you, by what service would you hope to have won a man's favour? Whatever it is that vexes bodies with its various cruelties, while we run through life in the swift race-course, contempt, rains, cold, fasting, quarrels, you will be able to endure with a contented mind, running about the city, going round it all day, scarcely returning home weary at midnight, and at once rising again at first light, that you may be the first to approach the closed doors. And when light sleep on the hard benches has forced you, weary, to lay down your head, he who came later will perhaps go in first, and your foolish complaint will knock at the ears of your friends. Or if your louder voice reaches the lictor, pray that you may go away well pushed back and not badly beaten. But suppose what is rare, that the doorkeeper, won by gold and prayers, at last says, “You may go in.” You go in, smooth of tongue and modest of face, submissive in body: yet none of this helps. Every honour has its price: you will go according to the weight of coin, whether you seek it by papers, or leaves, or tablets. For if the rich hand is idle, the matter is void, and if you give words, you too will carry away words. Look, the honour has smiled on you, which it is always the custom in the ranks to take late indeed, but to lay down quickly. For what you had given, soon another and another will confer: what many desire, no one has held for long.

Suppose, though, that the honour, lasting long, puffs you up and drives you on: will it not, all the same, have an end? Come, suppose that lasting annals mark your name, and a happy year goes by under your title: what use at last is power when it ceases to be? In what is it felt that it was, and has passed away? It is something the age that slowly follows will not know, and if it does know it, what reward will it be to you? But you who devote yourself only to earthly honour and now court men with such great ambition, if you would please Christ the Lord, whose all things are, and moreover earn the kingdom of God, you will set before them the true for the false, the vast for the small, the cheap for the splendid, the lost for the everlasting. What injury, then, will overcome a devoted breast? Will anything be too high? What is hard for you? For nothing is hard when hope follows, and every labour, crowned with honour, comes to its fruit, and to fruit that lasts for all time, which no prodigal, impatient canvasser takes away. You hear the Lord promising new rewards to the just, who will always give better than his promises, things not seen by eyes, not slipped into ears, not even pondered beforehand by sense itself. Now myrrh drips for you from its precious bark, the earth swells with fragrant turf of incense. Add thyme, violets, cassia, melilot and saffron, join white lilies to crimson roses. Since, a sinner, you receive so many gifts in these lands, what good things will you receive in heaven as a saint?

Come, imagine whatever is bright, whatever beautiful, whatever precious, and whatever you think great in the whole world, all this to be given to happy merits: golden roofs, jewelled doorposts and purple floor, and fields always fragrant with spring flowers, rivers full of milk and honey flowing along together. Because these things come up into our minds and are seen with the mind, believe that they will be lower than those goods. Yet do not fear lest, overcome by length of time, you be found unequal to the commands of God. Nothing in it is long, though it is driven on in long revolution, this brief life whose time we now enjoy. All things, weary, look toward their aging end, and already the hour turns on the last day. Look how swiftly death has pressed down the whole world, how many peoples the violence of war has struck down. Not the rough places of dense forest or lofty mountain, not rivers strong with rapid whirlpools, not forts in their positions, not cities safe in their walls, not places cut off by the sea, not grim ones in the wilderness, not hollows, not even caves beneath forbidding rocks, could elude barbarian hands. For many, feigned faith, for many, perjury, for many civic betrayal was the cause of death. Ambushes did much, open violence did much. What was not overcome by strength was overcome by hunger. The unhappy mother fell with her children and her husband; the master, with his slaves, went into slavery. Some lay as food for dogs; for many, the burning roofs that snatched away their life gave them a pyre.

through villages and country houses, through fields and crossroads and all the districts, along every road on this side and that, death, grief, destruction, burning, mourning. All Gaul smoked on a single pyre. Yet why should I count the funerals of a sliding world, which always go on along their accustomed path? Why should I recount how many die in the whole world, when you see your own day hastening on? I pass over how much is allowed to swords, how much to falling buildings, to fire, hail and rivers; how many are destroyed by war, famine and raging diseases, and by the one death that rushes on by various ways; and how many, even in the midst of peace, so that there may be peace, the punishment that is due torments as guilty. Every hour brings us little by little to death: even in this time in which we speak, we are dying beforehand. And through deceiving courses, with silent effort, the end of life presses upon our final days. While food and sleep, while words and cups soothe us, whether you sit at home or travel abroad, and while you do whatever you do or do not do, of its own accord death moves foot after foot, delaying not at all. As a candle set out in the time of blind night to make up for the day by the service of its light is consumed by slow fire while we do not notice, and the devouring flame always hastens to the end: so it is with the affairs of men: whatever is done perishes, and what life draws on for itself both advances and dies. But suppose the spans of a long-lived old age were so long that, yourself unharmed, you looked back on the funerals of the world,

though it come late, yet that end must come which cannot be absent altogether. For the things that are born grow afterwards and grow old, and for those worn out with old age nothing remains but death. He who has lived thrice ten years … and he who has lived … a thousand, once the final end holds them both, surely, at the last moment of death, it is the same. What use is it to have drawn out life, if you cease to live? Or what reward is there in good things, if you are held by evils, … since you are touched by the fruit of enjoyment only while you enjoy it, and this life lives only in the work of living? For what has been is nothing if it ceases to be; and what you do not feel, it is no help that it has been. What use, then, if fasting vexes you, to have loaded your limbs generously with yesterday's food, and, when thirst grips your dry throat today, to have been soaked beforehand with too much …? when the day that will not return snatches away the sense of the things that have run their course in its swift revolution? But we, when the flower of early youth has run its course, now unsteady in step, sight, voice and hand, when it is grief to remember whatever we were, and the nearest things snatch belief away from all that is past, bent and querulous, with body consumed, never does even this life, burdensome as it is, satisfy us enough. Hence it is that, as though far removed from the whole world, we watch whatever perishes in the whole world. Another's death, as if we wretched stayed beneath another sun, warns us of our own death.

Before our eyes and far away alike we are robbed of friends, and grief comes from there through the eyes, from here through the ear. Sweet parents perish as their age declines, and the wife is snatched from her husband's very bosom. Death takes a brother from a brother's embrace, and he perhaps was the younger by birth. Nor is the older age taken away in the order of life, when a father sees the cruel funeral of his son. Yet no one, being wary, believes what he sees, and that what he does not want, he sees he too may suffer. Yet this comes from this: because, our deeds being always unjust, we consider death an everlasting evil, and the punishments the holy law threatens for crimes we believe it gain to receive later. Happy is he who thinks the end of labours lawful, because, fearing beforehand, he has taken care not to fear afterwards. Happy he who can await the great judgment, to be set in motion by a great inquiry, renowned before cities and peoples, with constant mind and serene face, secure about the uprightness of his life, whom a mind well conscious of itself, for sure reasons, makes hold his head unafraid under so great a weight. There will be those once powerful in empire and kingdom, there those conspicuous with fasces and robes of state, whose custom it was to load gold with choice dishes, crystal with Falernian, and couches spread with purple; famous for strength, praised for the gift of beauty, and wrongly trusting in bodily resources; whose belly was their lord, wantonness their prayer, their hope in the present, riches their glory:

who, wretched, neglected even at the point of death to seek the Lord as their eyes were closing, will await punishment, shut away. Do not seek to be taught what punishment: a punishment fitting their deeds awaits them. Continual darkness under blind night will await some; to these … a severe flame will give light. Others, burning with sulphurous fire, will be forced to climb furnaces with torn bodies. Others hard ice, frozen by winter blasts, poured over them with violent stiffness, will bind. And though the nature of gehenna fights so discordantly, the force of the one name is yet varied. Nor could you tell, in punishment so diverse, whether the torment is heavier by fire or by cold. Not as with us here, where, for those slain by earthly death, many crimes receive a single death, since the judge, however cruel in proportion to the deeds, can do no more than snatch away the soul, and, by a kind of gain from crimes, if very many remain, the first vengeance denies punishment to the rest. But there a punishment fitting each one's deeds, following on, will pay out all offences in order. And one body will lie open, member by member, to as many punishments as it could to vices. One law will strike the cruel, another the greedy: deeds will be paid for in one way, things planned in another. The perjured have their punishment, the proud also their own, and the shedding of blood will be another case. The envious, the impatient, the effeminate, the forger, the adulterer, and he who was wholly given to wine, wholly to allurement,

he whose right hand is guilty of slaughter, whose tongue is ready with abuse, the usurper, the boaster, the impious, the unteachable, will pay penalties before the day of judgment, so that the delay of judgment gives not even a small respite from punishment. Serpents will wind round some with sinuous coils, while a chain glowing with fire will wear others away. All things there are full of tears, terror and pain, and there is no voice but what groaning gives. Why should I run on further through the several crimes which will vex the wretched with dire tortures? Since even if you now say anything with a careless mouth, you must give account of your speech. Among these, whoever has denied the Lord of all things, bowing his head to stones and stocks, he is truly wretched, and will be pitied by no one. He alone will receive whatever harms anywhere. Countless worms will live in his dying body, and there will be no end of the smoke the fire gives. But on the other side the company of the gentle and devout, if, though harassed, they did not return evil, if they gave help to the wretched, food to him who asked, affection to those they knew, service to their fathers, will shine with eyes like the flaming sun, their splendid limbs clothed in snow-white robes; and above all those whom, ready in the law of Christ, the nights receive and the days find, each of whom made it his vow never to stain the snow-white garment of baptism in women's beds, chaste not in body only but in the whole heart, and such as I would wish you, my reader, to be,

or those already happy, which is the first glory, who, having overcome the allurements of the light and of the faithless body, seeking the true life, did not fear to pour out their devoted souls for the name of Christ. And this band of saints will include priests and monks withdrawn from the whirlwinds of men, who now, spurning the delights of flattering fame, hope for the rewards of the judgment to come. Leading soft leisure in circumstances free of care, they live well now by their merit, and afterwards better. For they themselves will throng about the King in a dense band, when the Lord stands over the earth as judge, and they will all go wherever the Lamb turns, bathed in true light, the light of God. And their quickened faces will take on so much beauty that they cannot be looked upon by the eyes of beholders. Therefore, when the hollow trumpet has given its terrible call, bearing witness at last to the coming of God, soon the earth, torn apart by long cracks, will lie open, and everywhere flames, lightnings and hail will rush down, the world shaken utterly from its lowest foundations, while all the roads on this side and that are ablaze. Here sad groans, there the devout joys of life: one voice will be in the different throngs. And every father will go swiftly with hastened steps, leading his offspring and his line, and the whole lineage will be led in a continuous train, the forefather being in the middle of those he begot. Nor will I speak to you of famous cities and remote peoples and kingdoms that now are or once were,

peoples not sluggish with cold, nor scorched by the sun, and those whom the rising and the setting day held; but whatever was born from the time of the first world up to the day that will soon be the world's end, the first command will set in one place the souls, just and guilty, from all lands. Yet not one among so many thousands will go from there which has not been counted by its Lord. Soon, mounting the glowing tribunal in the same flesh which he had brought into heaven, glorifying man, all the things that slip by in order through the remaining ages, whatever is done then or hereafter while the law remains, holy in speech, lofty on his throne, terrible to behold, conspicuous, yet scarcely to be looked upon, he will judge. And amid the trails of flame and the sound of trumpets and angelic choirs and the holy army, amid the pallor, weeping, joys, prayers and fears of infants and mothers, youths and old men, the final sentence will be given to the waiting crowd, which will sound from the mouth of the most holy judge: “Go, company of the just, into rest and praise, never to be parted from my kingdom, which the Father, knowing your merit and your future life, gives you now, but as gifts prepared long ago. But you, always contrary to our commands, impious crowd, be shut away in the places of Tartarus. There teeth will give gnashing and eyes weeping, to be tormented in boundless fires.” And yet, so that whatever is commanded may truly remain, this will be the form of the eternal judgment:

glory will hold the just man, death being removed, and the guilty man will not die out of his punishment. These things I ought to have handed down to you by my deeds, reader, so that a life proved might give weight to my words. But since we wretched neglect whatever we are taught, and it is easier to learn than to do, if you commit to your mind, let down through the ear, all the things that are counted out in my writings, I will say it firmly: received into the station of heaven, you will shake off the hard chains of cruel death. And you who were before a son of gehenna will begin to be a son of the most high God. To these one thing remains, without which all things profit nothing: that you believe Christ is from the Father and with the Father; and the Holy Spirit, joined without any difference, so that the three names make up one God. But you, whoever you are who read our little book, whether it is bad or good, be mindful of us. And as often as, having read the poem through, you pray to the Lord Christ, may we always be on your lips. And lest you think I enjoin this with the edge of my lips, or think you may safely pass it over, so may no day pierce you with bitter cares, so may whatever you do wholly please Christ, so may you receive the holy crown from the Lord's hand, as you let not your care for my name depart, so that I, Orientius, who surpass all sinners, may obtain pardon by the prayers of the saints.